


You Will Be My Minister of Mirth

by eva_roisin



Series: Widows and Orphans [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel Family, Angels are Weird (Supernatural), Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Castiel Has PTSD (Supernatural), Castiel Has Self-Worth Issues (Supernatural), Castiel Out of the Empty (Supernatural), Castiel and Dean Winchester Reunion in Heaven, Castiel and Dean Winchester Use Their Words, Castiel and Dean Winchester in Love, Castiel in the Empty (Supernatural), Castiel is Jack Kline's Parent, Castiel is Saved from the Empty (Supernatural), Dean Winchester Has Self-Worth Issues, Dean Winchester Loves Castiel, Dean Winchester and Castiel Have Too Many Emotions, Dean Winchester in Heaven, Episode Fix-It: s15e20 Carry On, Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Hurt Castiel (Supernatural), Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Jack Kline as God, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Past Mind Control, Post-Episode: s15e20 Carry On, The Empty (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:54:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27905536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eva_roisin/pseuds/eva_roisin
Summary: For Dean and Cas, death is just the beginning of their journey to love one another.For all the ways life had been cruel to Dean, it had also been kind. He didn’t understand quite how kind until after Cas was dead, and then dead, and nothing could bring him back. How to accept everything was over? It hadn’t even begun.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Series: Widows and Orphans [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2025251
Comments: 43
Kudos: 196
Collections: SPN Finale "Destiel is CANON" Collection





	1. Chapter 1

The first time Dean thinks he sees Cas, he knocks him over. He can’t help it. Here’s his best friend, big as life, in heaven where he should be. Where he _always_ should have been. It pains Dean to admit this, but Cas never belonged on earth—not really.

And he sure as shit didn’t belong in the Empty.

But the figure in front of him isn’t Cas, and Dean doesn’t discover this until he’s already on the ground on top of this not-Cas person. This … Jimmy Novak person.

Sprawled on his back and staring up at Dean, Jimmy Novak appears stunned at first. Then he looks pissed. In the same space of time, Dean goes from elation to confusion to realization to massive, massive disappointment.

And then: embarrassment.

“You,” Jimmy Novak says, holding up his hands and then setting them on Dean’s shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Dean says, scrambling to his feet and grasping Novak’s hands in his own. He pulls him to an upright position. Thank God the ground in heaven is soft. Dean repeats himself as he finishes steadying Novak. He tries to ignore that a small crowd is circling around them—a crowd that seems to consist of Novak’s people—the family and friends he had while he was living. “I’m sorry. I just—I thought you were …”

“The angel that hijacked my body and flew it into the Eifel Tower, the World Trade Center, and the Taj Mahal on a weekly basis? Look elsewhere, pal.” He brushes his pants and starts to turn away but then changes his mind. “No, actually, if you see that celestial, tell him to keep his distance. This is heaven, and I respect that. I wouldn’t want to cause any difficulties.”

“Difficulties?” Dean says. Inwardly, he’s just glad he didn’t greet Cas—well, Jimmy Novak—with _hey ass-butt!_ And then, even more inwardly, he’s _really_ glad he didn’t greet him with what he truly wanted to say: _I love you too_.

“Jimmy, be cool,” says one guy in a dark jacket. “That’s Dean Winchester.”

Novak makes a small noise of exasperation and turns away. “Exactly. And just think—this used to be a good neighborhood.”

A couple people laugh as they turn and walk away. They leave Dean feeling more confused than the day he first set foot in heaven.

*

Which could have been days ago. Maybe weeks. Or maybe hours. Bobby wasn’t kidding when he said that time moves differently here. Other things that also move differently: People. Reality. Scenery. Thoughts. Dean knows he’s not trapped in a memory, but he’s not quite sure how to describe heaven in ordinary human terms. It feels both familiar and odd, like a recurring dream you’ve had your whole life, but less tenuous. More material. More _real_. And therefore, infinitely more fascinating. There’s a sense of perpetual déjà vu, but not in a way that makes you anxious. It’s all very strange and appealing, like walking into a room and not recognizing at first, and then realizing that it’s your childhood bedroom, except the walls are made of flowers.

It’s impossible to be bored in this place—it’s always changing. Also, he isn’t alone. He shares heaven with other people, but only when he wants to. When he wants to be alone, he can do that too. He can drive for hours or days on back country roads. Or he can go visit his parents, which he’s done already, right when he arrived. He can be in a city also, and it’s there that his own heaven overlaps with other people’s—friends, family members, and people he’s never met before. Where he can apparently run into Jimmy Novak, but not anyone particularly interesting, like John Lennon or Marilyn Monroe.

Or Cas.

He’s not bored with heaven, and he’s not dissatisfied. He might even describe himself as “at peace.” But he’s not happy—not _truly happy_ —and he knows exactly why.

If this is the heaven he “deserves,” then he wonders what that says about him. That he doesn’t deserve a heaven with angels? A heaven with Cas? He’s been assured that Cas exists, that he’s no longer in the Empty. Bobby told him as much, but Bobby also said that Jack had been there—and Dean hasn’t seen Jack either.

Dean wonders if both Jack and Cas are part of the fabric of heaven somehow—in the air and wind and sunshine and raindrops and all that shit. If so, then this isn’t his version of heaven—it’s hell, or some kind of twisted version of purgatory where he’s got to work out his “spiritual baggage” before moving on to the real deal. That might explain why Jimmy Novak’s in his heaven, and pissy as fuck to boot—Novak’s also got some baggage. Clearly. Maybe this “trial heaven” is a test to see if Dean can get along with everyone he pissed off when he was still alive. Once he does that, he gets a promotion.

But no, Dean doesn’t believe that. Jack wouldn’t do him dirty like that—not the same infinitely patient and forgiving Jack who’s created a heaven more beautiful than anything Dean deserves. Who’s given him back his parents and Bobby. Jack is not one to do tests or trials—he’s honest to a fault. He’s the son Dean never deserved but got anyway.

And Cas. Cas is the friend Dean never deserved either, a friend who sacrificed not just his life for Dean but his very existence—his essence—with no expectation of getting anything in return. And in the moment of truth, he was left with nothing. Dean couldn’t step up, couldn’t give Cas the bare minimum of what he deserved—the affirmation that Cas meant as much to Dean as he did to Cas.

It was a low bar to clear, and Dean failed. He left Cas all alone in the darkest moment of his life. There are no words. Nothing he can say or do, even now.

When he was alive, he dealt with his failure by drinking until he blacked out, or by driving to the middle of nowhere and howling his pain to some forest or empty road. But now that he’s no longer alive, he has no recourse. All he has is time to think about his failures. About the fact that the angel was a gift—a gift he didn’t appreciate.


	2. Chapter 2

_Earlier._

He doesn’t have a heart.

It’s the first thing the Empty ripped out of him when he arrived at his destination. The other inmates took care of the rest, shredding all six of his wings and pulling out his eyes. Since he’s been back heaven-side, he’s been busy regrowing his heart and eyes while other angels work on his wings, fitting them back together while he rests in some kind of suspended apparatus.

He thinks about how much he’d rather be human—a being whose body has a definitive endpoint—than an angel that will live forever and ever, apparently.

As he lies there, he can feel the thoughts of the angels working on him, their opinions—in Enochian, of course—piercing through whatever psychic defenses he has left. He shouldn’t be able to hear them, but he’s too weak to block them out. _This is what loving a human will do to you._ _Typical. Typical that they’d abandon one of us, once they got what they needed_.

_No sense of loyalty. No sense of integrity. Anyone who trusts a human—who lowers himself to live among them—well, can you be surprised? This is how they leave you. How you end up._

So he’s a cautionary tale now. How refreshing.

Even if he could respond, he wouldn’t. It’s not worth it, he’s learned over the years. He’s never been able to reason with fellow angels when it comes to the topic of humanity. He can’t make them see how extraordinary humans are in all their ordinariness—how uniquely versatile and sensitive, how much they accomplish during their mere eighty-five years on earth (a hundred if they’re lucky), a third of which they devote to sleeping. They love harder and more completely than any other being in existence, and with no guarantee of happiness or fulfillment. All with knowledge that they will grow old and die and lose or forget everything that mattered to them.

He’s been around for millennia, for eons. He can’t explain to other angels that of all that time, only the last ten years meant anything. Only in the last ten years was he truly alive.

And he must admit that he knows where they’re coming from. Like them, he spent the ages at a fair distance from humanity, stationed at the periphery to drive off demons. Until he met Sam and Dean, he didn’t know _why_ he did such a thing, except that it was his job.

He’d gladly go to the Empty again if it meant guaranteeing their safety, giving them more years to add to their impossibly short human lives. And he wouldn’t trade one day he spent with Dean—even the really bad days, when he and Dean fought, or when Dean lashed out at him and blamed him for things outside his control—for another hundred millennia added to his own existence.

And maybe he's a little bit biased, about humans. His son is half-human, after all. And his best friends.

He wishes he could tell all this to the other angels tending him. More to the point, he wishes he could pull himself into a sitting position and say to them in Enochian, _You know nothing. Don’t you realize that your God is half human? That the one who saved you was brought into this world and raised by humans? You’re not worthy of your own grace._ Then, in English: _Bite me_.

But he won’t do this, even if he had the strength. His caretakers are doing their best, after all. They’re the ones who take him daily to the Pools of Light to bathe him and tend to the deeper, less-visible wounds. They’re the ones who procure the healing sands to massage and restructure his muscles, thereby enabling him to regrow his heart.

He remembers why having a heart is important when Jack comes to see him. Jack—his beautiful child, his reason for still being here. And now his God, a God in whom he can finally put his faith. _I’d do anything for you,_ he thinks.

“Rest, Castiel,” Jack says, touching his forehead, cupping his face. “Shh, don’t say anything.”

“He’s coming along,” his nurse says in Enochian. “But he’s still critical. Of all the beings brought back from the Empty?”

“I know,” Jack says abruptly, cutting the nurse off from whatever else he was going to say. Then, more softly: “You tend to the body. I’ll see to his mind.”

*

So this is angel rehab. That’s what Cas calls it. He imagines Dean joking about it. “Angels have rehab? Is it a twelve-step thing? Do angels even _need_ to take steps? Or do the powers-that-be just springboard you into the night once when you’ve gotten your wings back?”

 _Yes and no_ , Cas would tell him. _Yes, angels have rehab. No, they don’t springboard us into the night because in our section of heaven there’s no such thing as night—not really_.

He tries not to feel glum, but he knows he’s not going back to earth. Things are different now.

“Things are very different now,” Jack tells him one afternoon when he comes to visit. Each time he does so, he spirits them away to a different but pleasingly familiar place where they can be together—a place that looks just like the human world. Cas lives for these visits, for these small milieus of happiness Jack has designed for them. Sometimes they go to a busy shopping mall and it’s Christmastime and the place is cloaked in fake holly garlands and lights. Or sometimes to an outdoor ice-skating rink where they grab hot chocolate and Jack does figure eights. (Cas does not skate. He’s still not strong enough.)

Sometimes they go to a diner or a bar or a waffle place that’s just like one of the many they frequented with Sam and Dean over the years. Other times they just sit on a bench in a park next to a pond. _Don’t feed the ducks,_ the sign warns. They ignore it, bringing along a bag of breadcrumbs and tossing them into the water for the ducks to eat.

These are the small joys they allow themselves, a place they can be together and speak English and wear human clothing and partake in the trappings of American kitsch.

But Cas knows it’s about more than allowing themselves to indulge in these rituals. It’s about closure. It’s about saying goodbye to the things they left behind—the human world with its broken sincerity and gaudy imperfections. The world of Sam and Dean, to which they’ll never return, not _really_. The world in which Cas was a father, a member of a family that was fascinating and thorny. More intense than anything he’d ever experienced, in all his millennia of being an angel.

He cries on a few of these excursions. He is, for lack of a better term, homesick. One time, he’s sitting next to the ice rink, watching Jack skate, and he just breaks down without warning, sobbing into one of his gloves. He never cried before, not in all his billions of years of being an angel, _not really_. Not until he said goodbye to Dean.

Now he can't stop crying.

Jack sees him crying and stops skating. Skates to the edge of the pond and then trudges over to the bench, still in his skates, wobbling. He sits down and wraps his arms around Cas and lets him cry into the scarf on his shoulder. “It’s hard, growing your heart back,” Jack says. “It hurts. I know.”

 _I want to go home_ , Cas thinks, clinging to Jack, remembering a time he was the stronger of the two. He recalls their last days on earth together, when Jack wept and confessed that he was scared. Now that their roles have been reversed, Cas just feels grateful. Jack has become so resolute, giving Cas the assurance he searched for during all those years when he couldn’t find God—the certainty that someone was out there, someone infinitely powerful and compassionate and working for humanity’s benefit.

Thanks to Jack, Cas is never scared.

Jack’s a proponent of therapy, and Cas knows that’s what this really is. This—all this father-son bonding shit in the middle of American nowhere—exists to give Cas a space to process things so he can move on. Because that’s what helped Jack move on, back when he lived on earth.

It probably won’t work for Cas. He’s not human, after all.

When Jack shares with him his ideas for this new heaven, Cas recognizes that Jack understands humanity. He knows what people really need. Not perfection or absence of conflict, but space to be apart and space to come together and space to work things out. And reason to be purposeful. People in heaven can choose how to spend their time; they can work if they want; they can counsel other lost souls if they so desire.

But they can’t go back. No one can go back. Letting people jump between worlds—that was the problem. That was done solely for Chuck’s amusement, regardless of the price to humanity.

“People need to know what’s germane to their reality,” Jack says. “They need to live without our interference. We have to give them the right to do that.”

One day, when they’re sitting on the bench and feeding the ducks, Cas asks Jack if he’s checked in on Sam and Dean. Jack says he has, and that they’re fine.

“You’ve spoken to them?”

“Cas, you know I can’t do that. Not like we used to.”

“Is Dean still drinking too much?”

Jack sighs.

“At least tell me they’re not still hunting. I mean, they’re both capable hunters, but they take risks, Jack. They always took too many risks.” He tries not to remember how many times he pulled the Winchesters out of some beartrap. Not that it wasn’t worth it. But it bothered him, how little Sam and Dean thought about themselves, how readily they jumped in with both feet without weighing the consequences to their own lives. _Whatever it costs. Whatever it takes._

Jack says nothing, and Cas knows that he already knows. He knows how their stories will end, how they’ll die. And he could prevent the worst outcomes if he wanted, to, but—

“You know I can’t do anything,” Jack says. “Or, I _won’t_. I won’t intervene in their lives, Cas. I won’t take away their agency, their choices. That’s what Chuck did, and it was wrong.”

Cas tosses some bread into the pond and watches as several ducks swim for the same piece. “I know, Jack. You don’t have to explain.”

Jack relaxes.

He doesn’t ask if Sam and Dean are happy. He doesn’t have to. Few people in the human world are happy, and he knows Sam and Dean have had a harder go of it than most. He wishes they’d do what he did—just give themselves permission to be. To enjoy what they have. Before it’s too late.

As Jack stands to leave, Cas reaches out to touch his arm. “I never thanked you properly,” he says.

Jack looks at him quizzically.

“For bringing me back. For getting me out of the Empty.”

Now Jack looks even more puzzled. “Cas. You saved yourself.”

Cas doesn’t quite process this. He tries to turn his thoughts back to the Empty, but he has nothing. Only the knowledge that it was terrible and he suffered and was slammed into an abyss with enemies he’d spent a lifetime pissing off.

It’s a story he’s been told—not something he actually lived.

Jack’s stare intensifies as he studies Cas. “You really don’t remember.” He sits down again. “Cas, I tried. For weeks. But even I didn't have much control over the Empty, especially since your deal with it was so sound. I’m _presence_ , Cas. The Empty was pure absence, the absence of everything. You were nowhere.”

“You got me out the first time.”

“Maybe when I woke you from the Empty before, it started a chain reaction that—” He paused. “Well, maybe my waking you filled the void with _something_ , I don’t know.”

Jack goes quiet. Then he peers at Cas again. “I’m sorry, Cas. You should never have been there. No one should have been there, not even demons. But you’re the one who stopped it, Cas. Not me. _Cas_.” Jack looks at him more closely. “You’re tired.”

He is. He’s been allowing Jack’s words to wash over him without really thinking too hard about them.

Jack reaches over to touch his face. “Sleep, Cas.”

*

He sleeps. When he half-awakens in his hospital bed, he has a memory that feels like a dream. He remembers one of his last missions with Dean—the mission to recover the Leviathan blossom in purgatory. The mission where they were separated and Dean prayed to Cas, telling him he was sorry. Cas heard every word.

That night, they sat in the kitchen together, Dean drinking bourbon. Cas could scarcely remember a time when things looked so bleak. Their chance at defeating Chuck had gone shitside. Jack was dead.

After Sam went to bed, Dean continued to drink and Cas stayed with him. Even though they were inside, deep underground, the shadows seemed to grow longer. Finally Dean got up from the table. Cas planned on staying there—he rarely slept anyway.

“C’mon, Cas,” Dean said. “You’re not planning to sit here all night, are you?”

Cas shrugged.

“It was a long day. Even for an angel. Even if you don’t sleep, you might as well be comfortable.” And then he held out his hand. Cas grasped it, pulling himself to his feet.

In the corridor, Cas trailed behind Dean. “Dean,” he said.

They both stopped walking. Dean turned around.

“What happened between us—it can’t happen again. Not like that, not—” He couldn’t finish his sentence. _Not because of us_ , he thought.

Dean nodded, his eyes glassy. Sad and red-rimmed from both too much alcohol and stress. “I know, man. I don’t know why I do half the things I do. It’s like, I’m not even me sometimes.”

“You’re human,” Cas said.

“No, that’s—that’s not good enough.” He seemed to look past Cas. “It’s like I’m standing outside myself, watching myself say things. And I don’t know who this is. I can’t blame Chuck, either. It’s me.” He catches Cas’s gaze and then says: “I lied to myself. I lied when I said I could lose you again.”

Cas couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t even bring himself to whisper Dean’s name.

What happened next happened quickly. Dean stepped forward, filling the small space between them. He set his hands against Cas’s shoulders and pushed him against the wall. Not gingerly, but not aggressively either. He pressed himself against Cas, the heat of his breath against his neck at first, and then his cheek. And their lips met briefly, and Cas could feel his own desire, clinging like sap, and he remembered again what it meant to be enfolded in a human body, to be ensconced in its desire for closeness and warmth.

Dean pulled away then, and Cas had to admit he was relieved because he hadn’t, in that moment, known how it was going to end. And Dean was drunk—who knew if he’d remember anything the next day.

And there were, of course, Cas’s own misgivings. He’d spent his entire existence indoctrinated against the idea of having a human lover. Not just because it wasn’t allowed—not just because his job in earlier times had been to track down and dispatch the children of these couplings. But because it was considered wrong, a violation of duty and a betrayal of trust. Humans were vulnerable, considered low-hanging fruit. Angels existed to help them, not take advantage of them.

Above all, he knew it was something Dean probably didn’t want. Might regret. And that alone stopped him.

As Dean retreated into his own bedroom, Cas felt relief. Regret would come later.

But soon, even for regret, it would also be too late.


	3. Chapter 3

He senses a presence in the doorway of his room. He opens one of his many eyes. Then closes it. “Metatron. What are you doing here?”

“Just thought I’d stop by on my way to the rec room. This OT is killing me.”

Cas closes his eye. He doesn’t like being looked at.

He knows that Metatron is here because Metatron was also brought back from the Empty. He remembers now. He was shocked to see him in the Empty when he arrived—hadn’t Metatron died a human? “Well, take that up with the Empty,” Metatron said. “It claims I’m its property, and it doesn’t seem interested in litigating the matter. It’s like the age of irony, Castiel. Just when you think you’ve put it behind you, it claps back.”

He opens his eye again to find Metatron still standing there. “What are you looking at?”

“Geez. Don’t flatter yourself, Mr. Rochester—I’m not here for the view. I thought you might like to come along.”

“Why would I do that?”

Metatron chuckles quietly. “Good to know the Empty didn’t change your charming personality. Well, I’m off to play some tiddlywinks for my social hour. Gadreel’s already in there.” He walked away.

Gadreel. A vague memory sprang to mind: Gadreel had been in the Empty too. One of the first angels he’d seen when he arrived.

It was strange—the first time he’d been in the Empty, it was quiet and dark and cavernous. So lonely. But when he arrived the last time—for his permanent death—the Empty wasn’t just mind-numbing; it was actively painful. Everyone was awake. He was assailed by the regrets and shattered hopes and fears of every angel and demon he’d put in that place.

They all wanted their pound of flesh. Revenge time.

“Last time you were here, this place was the Stanford Prison Experiment,” Metatron explained. “Now it’s the fucking New Mexico State Penitentiary riot. And we’re Cellblock Four. And you, Castiel, are the king of the snitches. Ergo, we are fucked.”

It took his eyes a second to adjust. Besides Metatron, with him were Gadreel, Malachi, Anna, and Bartholomew. And … _Crowley_? (What the fuck.)

“I’m not thrilled to be locked up with you feathered dingbats either,” Crowley said.

“As I said,” Metatron continued, “welcome to the snitch ward. Otherwise known as the ninth circle of hell, made specially to house those who betrayed their own kind.” 

Cas peered into the darkness, trying to process this information. “But—far more angels and demons than just us have betrayed their own kind. Where are _they_?”

“Who knows,” Metatron said. “They’re not as unpopular, I guess. Being on this ward means you’re a special kind of Jeffrey Epstein pariah. Which you must have undoubtedly figured out when you opened your eyes to see little old me. I mean, are you high, Castiel? Did you really think you were going to stroll into the _good_ section of the afterlife, after the crap you pulled? Through the _front_ door?”

Of course he hadn’t thought that. But he hadn’t entertained sharing a bench in the Empty with Metatron and Gadreel and Crowley either.

Metatron continued. “No one gets to do what we did and walk away for free. All the years of treachery, of douchebaggery, of double-crossing. The bill has come due, and we’re paying it.”

“We pay it nightly,” Gadreel said. “Every night they break in.”

“Who?”

Metatron rolled his eyes. “The Kardashians, Einstein. Who do you think? Everyone we put here. And others for good measure. Anyone not feeling the love.”

“They can get in here?”

“They get very creative,” Crowley said. “They come up with a new way to kill you, every time. I have to admit, even _I’m_ impressed.”

“Afterwards we go back to regenerating ourselves,” Anna said. “The next day, it begins again.”

Then Cas could hear it: the thrumming of inmates against some unseen wall. How was it possible? There were no walls in the Empty. Not the way heaven had walls …

Now he pushes himself to a sitting position, trying to shake off those memories, the heavy feelings of dread and the nightly weight of anticipation, of knowing that these entities—angels he considered family—were going to beat the walls down once again to shred his wings, take out his eyes, burn him alive, and pulverize the rest of his being.

The worst thing was knowing that he maybe deserved it. And not just for his crimes against other angels—there were so many other ways he’d lapsed. Failed.

Failed Dean when it mattered.

Sitting up in his bed, he thinks that maybe he _should_ check out the rec room. Just to get his mind off things. He hadn’t expected his memories to return like this, and he doesn’t want to be alone with his thoughts, thoughts of betrayal and—

No, he hadn’t meant to betray his brothers and sisters the way he did, to cause them suffering; it was just something that _happened_. One desperate decision turned into another, and then another, until it felt as though he had no choices at all. He’d sided with the Winchesters most of the time, and he believes he was right to do so. The Winchesters saved the world and raised Jack, making this version of heaven possible. 

If presented with the same choices? He’d make the same decisions. But the knowledge doesn’t make him feel any better. He never wanted to cause anyone pain.

He also knows that other angels think he rebelled for Sam and Dean because he preferred them to his own kind, or they made him feel special and wanted—the way he’d never felt in heaven or in a garrison. Or that he was just stupid, dimwitted—manipulated into serving the needs of humans rather than the needs of heaven.

But things were far more complicated. Yes, he preferred Sam and Dean. Yes, he loved Dean more than he’d ever loved anyone in his long, long life. But he also sided with them because he knew—and he felt this deeply—that they were trying to do the right things. The hard things. The things that set them against other humans, other forces, and all the power of authority.

He’d never met two beings, on heaven or earth, who had such integrity. He was baffled by it at first—and later, humbled. They didn’t care what anyone thought, what anyone said. They questioned every source of knowledge, every assumption, rather than falling back on what anyone told them to do.

Dean especially. You could say shitty things about Dean, and some of them would be true—but you had to admit: he was never for sale. _Whatever it takes. Wherever it leads us. We will find a way, Cas. Like we always do._

When Cas first met Dean, he was shocked that Dean didn’t defer to him, or to the authority he represented. Other humans he’d known—well, once they saw his wings, they were terrified. Or worshipful of the God they thought he spoke for.

Not Dean. Dean gave approximately two shits about God or angels. Dean was just so _arrogant_ , Cas thought at first. So crude and irreverent. He wondered how someone who’d seen so much could have so little faith in a higher power. Then he realized: Dean had faith in a higher power—he just had faith that the higher power _sucked_. If the God Castiel represented did indeed exist, then he was a very indifferent God.

Sometimes Cas thinks that if he’d found one angel with half of Dean’s integrity, with that kind of grit—well, things might have gone differently.

He tries to put Dean out of his mind. Dean is back on earth, where he belongs, and Jack probably won’t send Cas for a tour of duty there for another three millennia. That’s probably for the better. In the meantime, he has to figure out how to get along with his fellow angels. Clear his debts. Pay his dues. Ask for forgiveness and hope like hell they can move past all the strife of the last twelve years. After two civil wars and a few failed coups, he knows he’ll never be accepted by them again—not really.

He reaches for a robe. Then he stretches out his arm to grab the handle of a wheelchair. He pulls it toward him. His wings are tattered and he’s still weak—not quite strong enough to walk more than the length of a room.

The infirmary hallways are bright and clean. Institutional. He’ll have to talk to Jack about that. Then again, this is an angel rehab facility, and angels like structure. Familiarity. Hierarchy. Maybe it’s best not to change things up so soon—especially since so many of his brothers and sisters just got out of the Empty, where there was only chaos. Terrible chaos.

He hears voices coming from the common room, talking in a familiar Enochian clip. He wheels himself to the doorway, prepares to say “Hello brothers, sisters” but doesn’t get the chance.

“Hey, look who’s up!”

Seven heads swivel in his direction. He sees not just Metatron and Gadreel but also Tyrus, Abner, and … Gabriel? They’re seated around a table. Mirabel and Ambriel are a few feet away on a couple of cushioned chairs. Both Gadreel and Tyrus spring to their feet, but Tyrus gets to him first, pushing his wheelchair into the room and toward the table. Cas tries saying he doesn’t need the help, but his voice is drowned out by the inquiries about how he’s feeling.

At the table they’re playing cards.

“We wondered if you’d ever get up,” Gabriel says.

“Really,” Cas says. Stalling, trying to buy himself time. They all look happy. He tries not to be too suspicious. They’re newly back from the Empty—of course they’re cheerful.

“We kept stopping by,” Mirabel says. “You were out of it. You looked terrible. You look better now.”

 _For a pariah_ , he thinks. “You were watching me sleep?”

“It’s kind of what we do,” Gabriel says, shuffling the deck to deal a new hand. “What we _should_ do, anyway. Watch over each other. You want me to deal you in?”

“No, thank you.”

“Live a little, Castiel,” Metatron says. “Let’s see you bluff your way past Gabriel.”

“Not happening,” Gabriel replies. “Besides, you just want to see me distracted so I stop cleaning _you_ out.”

Cas stares at Gabriel. Something’s different about him. He couldn’t put his finger on it at first, but now—

“You’re not an archangel anymore,” he says.

Everyone looks up. Stares at him.

“Damn, you really have been in the wind these last few weeks.” Gabriel deals everyone five cards. “I haven’t been since we all got back. Since _you_ got us all back in one piece, hermanito.”

It’s a piece of information that Cas won’t register until later—his mind is too preoccupied with this odd scene in front of him, with Gabriel tolerating Metatron, and Gadreel and Abner apparently reconciled.

Metatron picks up his cards. “Gabriel’s the only angel in the history of creation happy to get a demotion.” 

“No, I’m the rare angel who’s not hierarchy-obsessed, Metatron. Not that you’d understand, but there’s a difference. I happen to agree that archangels were part of the problem. And plus.” He looks around at them and smirks. “I enjoy slumming with you folks. No really, I do.”

“That’s big of you.”

“Too bad your brothers aren’t as open-minded,” Gadreel says.

“Michael and Raphael? They’ll come around. Or they won’t. In any case, fuckers can’t just ride roughshod over the neighborhood anymore, and believe me, that’s a good thing.” He looks down at his cards. “Great family. They take the fun out of dysfunctional.”

Cas feels uneasiness welling inside him. Maybe it’s the mention of Raphael. And _Michael_. Or maybe it’s because everyone’s being just a little too nice to him, too civil.

Cas suspects it’s because of Jack. They’ll want a favor down the road. Or they want to stay in God’s good graces. What better way than sucking up to God’s dad? He should tell them not to waste their time—he’s not someone with any kind of power, and he plans to remain that way. He’s not interested in pettiness or politicking. He’s not a leader. Has zero ability to govern other angels. No, from here on out, he’s happy to be the bumbling, ineffectual dad who Jack visits on the weekends.

He senses a presence in the doorway. Before he can turn his head, Gabriel says, “Hey, Hannah. How’s it shakin’? Do you want me to deal you in?”

Hannah stands there. “Is that—”

“Yeah,” Gabriel says, gesturing to Cas. “Back from the brink.”

Hannah’s gaze meets his, and it’s a strange moment. Cas can’t decide if she’s devastated or unnerved or just relieved. “Castiel,” she says, and her voice sounds odd and faraway.

She crosses the room, bends down, and puts her arms around him. Tight. Gives him a quick but resolute kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, Castiel,” she says as she pulls away slightly, looking him in the eyes, her arms still loosely around him.

“For what?” he says, shaken. He touches her arm, which is still wrapped around him.

“‘For what?’” She gives him a look that’s surprised and amused, a smile at the corner of her mouth, her eyes wet. “For my life, Castiel. What else?”

He’s still for a moment, trying to process this information. How could he have possibly saved Hannah? He remembers watching her die.

She stands but keeps one hand on his shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Gabriel elbow Abner. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your game. We’ll catch up later.” She smiles, says goodbye. Cas turns and watches as she goes back into the hallway.

He doesn’t want to turn around again to face the others at the table; he senses something is very wrong here. So he gives a hurried goodbye and avoids looking anyone in the face and wheels away and refuses offers to help him back to his quarters.

None of this is real. How could it be? Metatron in heaven? Gabriel not an archangel anymore? Gadreel and Abner sitting _side by side_?

And Hannah thanking him for her life.

He remembers now: in the Empty, she was the one to drive a hot steel rod through his head. Every night. An event that never became less excruciating no matter how many times it happened. 

He knows now that he’s still in the Empty, having some fucked-up dream. Instead of being tormented by the people he betrayed and the causes he failed, he’s now being given some sappy vision of forgiveness and reconciliation, just so he can suffer additional anguish when it all gets snatched away. He never came back. He’s not seen Jack since their last day on earth together. All of this—this angel rehab, these trips with Jack—it’s all just bullshit, a projection on his part, a hackneyed dream fueled by all the time he spent on earth watching terrible daytime TV.

His chest is tightening. Blackness nips at the corners of his vision. He just wants to get back to his room to be alone in whatever weird dream he’s having. 

He manages to maneuver his wheelchair around the corner. Then he sees someone standing in his doorway. The person turns around. It’s Balthazar.

Cas feels as though he’s been punched.

“Cas.” Balthazar looks down at him, his eyes soft and transparent. He takes a step toward him.

Without thinking, Cas tries to push himself to his feet. “Balthazar,” he says—or that’s what he _thinks_ he’s says. He’s not sure if he manages even that much. He tries to say he’s sorry, but he hits the floor before he has a chance.

*

“Of course this is real, Cas. Why do you have so much trouble believing?”

He and Jack are sitting together on a bench on a street of a small, quaint town that looks vaguely Midwestern, like someplace he’s either been or dreamed about.

“I mean, _this_ isn’t real,” Jack clarifies, gesturing to the town. “But the hospital, your friends—yes, of course they’re real. No, you’re not still in the Empty.”

They’ve been through this. Cas can tell he’s testing Jack’s patience.

He decides to change the subject. “How is your mother?”

“She’s good. She asks about you. She wants to know why you haven’t come to see her yet.”

Cas looks down at his hands. Then he nods and looks over at Jack. “I will.”

“I know you will. But Cas.” He puts his hand on Cas’s forearm. “What’s going on? What is this really about? What happened to you yesterday?”

He doesn’t remember much. Only getting up to see the other angels in the common room, and then leaving abruptly to go back to his room, and then the ground rushing up to meet him, and—

“Balthazar,” he says.

“He’s the one who found you when you collapsed?”

“He’s more than just that, Jack.”

Jack peers at him. “I know.”

He turns his head. “You know? What do you know? That he was once my closest friend and I murdered him in cold blood?”

Jack opens his mouth. Then he closes it. “From what I understand, things were a bit more complicated.”

“They really weren’t, Jack,” Cas interrupts, his voice clipped. “I stabbed him in the back.” Realizing how defensive he sounds, he stops himself. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. Look, Cas.” Jack shifts a little, angling himself toward Cas. “I know this transition has been hard for you. It’s been hard for me, too, I won’t lie. Things all happened very fast. For _both_ of us. And—I know what it’s like in the Empty. I know how it warps you. How it tries to _break_ you by confronting you with your worst regrets. But it didn’t break you, Cas. It didn’t, I promise.”

Cas isn’t so sure. What is he now, if not broken? He can’t even think. Can’t remember.

“All the same, I can’t imagine the willpower it took for you to escape, and then to help everyone else escape. But Cas.” Jack looks right at him, and his eyes are soft. “You have to forgive yourself.”

Cas looks away.

“I’m serious. You don’t think you deserve to be forgiven. But I’m here to tell you that you simply are. _Of course_ you’re forgiven. Why can’t you just trust that?”

“Because—” He starts to speak but nothing comes. He’s breathing harder all of a sudden—in anticipation of either a panic attack or an ugly crying jag, he can’t decide. “Because I’m—”

Jack grabs his wrist. “Cas, look at me.”

His eyes meet Jack’s.

“You extend forgiveness to others all the time. You forgave me when I killed Mary.”

He shakes his head. As if anything Jack had done could rival Cas’s worst deeds. He remembers his months in purgatory, knowing he deserved to be there while Dean did not. Each night he thought of the angels he’d betrayed. The ways he’d failed Dean. What he’d done to Sam, taking down the wall in his mind because it was a card he could play—a way to blackmail Dean. Because back then he couldn’t—and maybe didn’t want to—understand what that did to a human. The kind of suffering he’d caused.

And that’s to say nothing of what he did to Jimmy Novak’s family.

Jack wasn’t alive long enough to have these kinds of regrets.

“You were just a kid, Jack. What happened to Mary—it was an accident.”

“An accident I could have stopped. I killed Sam and Dean’s _mother_. And still you forgave me. And _they_ forgave me. But not just that, Cas.” He paused. “You gave second and third chances to other angels all the time. You enabled Gadreel to redeem himself. You showed Metatron mercy, and he went on to sacrifice himself for Sam and Dean. Trust me, I know these things. They’ve told me. And that’s on top of—” Jack lowered his gaze. “You wouldn’t leave anyone behind in the Empty, Cas. You could have. But you didn’t.”

“I don’t—I don’t remember any of that,” he says, realizing that his breathing has grown more regular. Leave it to Jack to talk him down.

“You will. When you’re ready.”

He thinks of Hannah’s arm around him, her kiss on his cheek.

“If everyone around you deserves redemption, Cas, then why do you think you don’t?”

Cas doesn’t want to be having this conversation anymore. “How are Sam and Dean?”

*

Once again, Dean’s heaven is a road.

He remembers the first time he was in heaven—when Cas told him he had to find the road and keep following it. Is that what’s going on this time? Will all roads lead to Cas? Or just some?

He just keeps moving. Heaven is wild and beautiful, combining the most beautiful scenery earth can offer with some weird ethereal twist—sunlight shaded blue. Wind you can taste. One day, he longs for a thunderstorm, and when he turns a bend he sees one on the horizon. He loved storms on earth; here they’re better because he doesn’t have to worry about tornadoes. He decides to pull over and climb into the backseat. There’s even a blanket back there. (Where did that come from?) He rests as sheets of rain pummel the Impala—he always found rain so comforting on earth.

There’s no need to sleep in heaven, but sometimes it feels good to be still. He often prays.

Initially he prayed to Cas. _Where are you? Why won’t you come see me? Are you even here? Did my deodorant fail? Is this you being stubborn?_

When he got no answer, he wondered if he was going about this prayer thing the wrong way—acting the way he did on earth by expecting Cas to show up, and getting mad when he didn’t.

 _I just hope you’re okay_ , he started to pray. _You must be busy with all this. I hope you’re not too tired. I hope you’re happy._ And then: _I’m sorry you weren’t happy when you were with us. With me_.

It’s something that really bothers him now—that Cas hadn’t been happy. Or worse, that Dean had made him actively miserable. Yeah, he had that way about him. And worse, he knows his mother tried to talk to him about it.

He should have listened to his mother.

It’s a memory he didn’t revisit until after Cas died, in the long weeks and months afterward, when there were too many hours in a day. He got drunk enough to sleep through half of them, but it still wasn’t enough.

Everything took on a different meaning. He remembered a few years ago when he and his mother had been sitting in the reading room together, cleaning guns.

“Do you think those stuffy British Men of Letters ever intended their reading room to be used in this way?” Mary asked, the pieces of her rifle spread out on the cloth.

“Probably not. But then again, they should have known better when they built their bunker in the middle of nowhere, Kansas. Out here, ‘gun control’ means figuring out how to get better aim.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

His mother was so diligent about cleaning her gun, so particular. That must be where Sam got his anal retentiveness. Of course, Sam preferred to use the reading room for _reading_ , the big nerd. So perhaps Dean was more like his mother than he thought.

“Where’s that friend of yours, Castiel?”

Dean took a swig of beer and shrugged. “Hopefully on a beer run. But maybe not. Every now and then he pisses off and goes back up to heaven. Just to check in with mission control. Which I think is a shitty idea, don’t get me wrong. Heaven does not have a lot going for it these days.”

“No? That’s a shame.”

“He’s better off down here with us.”

“Well, he certainly seems very nice. Earnest.” She hadn’t looked up from her gun so far, but now she did, tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear. “Be careful with him, Dean.”

He looked up, puzzled. “Careful? Mom, Cas is a brother to us. We trust him with our lives.”

“I don’t mean it like that. I mean, well.” She put her gun down. “I mean, be careful with his feelings. He … he seems to take you very seriously, Dean.”

“He’s a serious guy.”

“He seems very sensitive.”

Dean picked up his bottle again. “Well, he is an angel. He sometimes doesn’t get our sense of humor. Shit sails right over his head.”

“Maybe you’re right.” She went back to her gun.

“No, really. What do you mean?”

She paused, her eyes meeting his. “He’s very devoted to you, Dean. I think—I think you mean a lot to him.”

“Oh yeah, I know what you mean. He’s got a big ol' man-crush, we know. It’s kind of a punchline. What can I say, I make friends everywhere I go.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of this term, this ‘man-crush.’”

“Yeah, it’s a new thing, I guess.”

They changed the subject and never talked about it again. He wishes he’d listened, though.

Maybe he should go see his mother now, ask her about this. But what advice could she possibly give?

Sometimes he prays to Jack. But not about Cas—not like that. His issues with Cas aren’t Jack’s problem. He just tells Jack he’s proud of him, hopes he’s doing well. Asks him to watch out for Sammy. And then, for Cas.


	4. Chapter 4

In a memory so vivid it hurts, Dean is sitting on the kitchen floor drinking beer. (His fourth? Fifth?) His pictures are in his lap—photographs of Mom and Dad, of Mom and him as a toddler, of Mom and him and Sammy. Poor Sammy: there were so few pictures of him and Mom. And really, if Dean’s being honest, so few pictures of Sammy at all, period. Dad wasn’t exactly a “Kodak dad.” No way. It was just another way they weren’t normal. Throughout the years, he’d been in and out of enough normal people’s houses to see how normal people did things—how they documented the details of their children’s lives. How they kept photos of _everything_. Vacations to the beach, visits to Santa Claus, first days of school, missing teeth. Snow days, outings to the swimming pool, birthdays, picnics, bike rides, whatever. Pictures just because. Brothers and sisters posed side by side, giving each other bunny ears, or standing outside a minivan, or cuddling a cute dog, or eating cookies with Grandma, or catching fireflies in a backyard.

Other people had so many fucking pictures. They even took pictures of their kids taking _baths together_. (He and Sammy had taken baths together when they were little—maybe it was good Dad hadn’t been a Kodak Dad.)

All the pictures he had of his family were in his lap. They were so scant, so few. The history of his life: a history of scarcity.

His eyes watered, he shook his head. Mom was back. _Mom_. He’d never believed such a thing was possible—of course he hadn’t. _You gave me what I needed most_ , Amara said. _I want to do the same for you_.

And now that he had what he needed most—what he’d apparently _always_ needed most—he didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t wrap his fucking head around it—any of it.

He had a feeling he was a massive disappointment to his mother. Or that he would be, once she knew more about him. He didn’t know that for sure; he just sensed it.

And now he sensed a presence in the doorway. He looked up. Cas. “Hey,” he said. Good thing he’d had so many beers; if not, he might actually be embarrassed to be so misty-eyed over old photographs.

Then again, why be embarrassed? It was Cas.

“Hello, Dean.”

Dean looked up and just nodded. Then he went back to staring at the photographs.

Cas stepped into the room and looked down at where Dean was sitting on the floor, empty beer bottles surrounding him. “How’s your mother? Is she settling in?”

“Sammy’s with her now. Here, you want a beer?” He held out an unopened bottle.

“I’m fine, Dean.” Cas walked toward him, hands in his coat pockets. Then, to Dean’s surprise, sat down on the floor next to him, his back against the cabinets. He peered at the photographs. “Can I see?”

Dean handed him the photographs.

As he flipped through them, Cas’s lips turned upward. “I see a resemblance.” 

“Yeah, as a baby Sam looked just like Fred Astaire. Isn’t it weird?”

Cas’s eyes met his and they were warm and affectionate. Lately Dean saw him looking more and more like that—more sensitive. 

Cas was changing. Had changed.

Even before his mother brought it to his attention months later, Dean had noticed. He’d noticed how sensitive Cas had become. Cas had always been a good friend, their _very best_ friend. But there was something about the way he’d thrown his arms around Dean right before Chuck had sent him to take out Amara, something achy and desperate. When Cas had said, “I could go with you,” Dean heard tears in his voice. He couldn’t look at Cas too long, not at that point, or he might start crying himself. Better to get back to the business at hand, and to give Cas a job to do: _Look out for Sam_.

Now Cas kept looking at the pictures, smiling as though he were carrying around the secret memory of something good. “Mothers,” he said, as though to himself. “They’re just so … crucial.” He held the picture of Mary with Dean, running his fingertip along the edge. “We angels, we just don’t understand.”

“No?” Dean took a swig of his beer.

“We understand what mothers are rationally. And we know why they’re important. They give life. They nurture. But emotionally?” He flipped to the picture of Mary holding Sam. “None of us has a mother, so there’s no analogue in the angel world, no easy way to explain it to other angels that … well. The loss of a mother? There must be nothing like it.”

Dean just sat there.

Cas cleared his throat. “As for other parental figures, well. You’ve got the leader of your garrison, I suppose. Not much of a parent. And our father was, well, this distant, abstract concept.” He looked up. “There’s a piece missing from us, Dean. It’s why angels are the way we are.”

“What do you mean, the way you are?”

“How did you put it? Dicks.”

At moments like this, Dean remembered why he loved Cas. “Cas, I didn’t mean it like—I didn’t mean _you_. Well, okay, I did mean you. At the time. But—”

Cas smiled. “It’s okay. I was a dick. And even when I wasn't trying to be, there were a lot of times I _did not_ get it. Last year with Claire, for instance. I thought if I just went to her and gave her some money and helped her get back on her feet, that it would be enough. It wasn’t until you and Sam explained things to me …” His eyes met Dean’s. “Parents are everything. Without them around, you’re lost.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, his voice little more than a whisper. He picked up an empty beer bottle and started peeling back the label. “That’s why I’m glad for—I mean, I’m so happy for Sam. He never had Mom at all, Cas. Never. I have memories of Mom. A few. Good ones. But Sam … he was an infant. He has what I told him, what Dad told him. I remember him saying to me one time—”

Cas tilted his head forward. “What?”

Dean was thinking of the time they were in heaven, traveling from one good memory to the next, and none of Sam’s had included Dean or anyone else in their family, and Sam had simply said, _I never got the crusts cut off my PB &J._

“He really had nothing, Cas. I mean, _nothing_ of Mom to remember or hold onto. I don’t know how he even managed to …. I mean, look at him now. He’s just—”

 _He’s just someone Mom can be proud of_ , he thought. When he’d been alone with his mother, looking for Sam, he’d filled Mary in on the details of Sam’s life. His achievements. National Merit Scholar. Stanford. Hell yeah, Mom, you heard that right. Fucking _Stanford_.

(Before Sam had gone to college, Dean hadn’t heard of Stanford. Didn’t know what the hell it was. So he went to the library to look it up on the internet. There he discovered that it was being attended by none other than Chelsea Clinton. That’s right. _Chelsea fucking_ _Clinton_. Fucking A. Sammy was going to school with the goddamned president’s daughter. “She graduated before I got there,” Sam explained to him some years later. As if it somehow lessened the achievement.)

“He needs to be with Mom right now.”

“Is that why you’re drinking here? On the floor?” Cas said.

“I’m drinking because I feel like it. Because I drink every night. And tonight the floor just seemed like the place.”

Cas didn’t say anything as he continued to flip through the pictures. Even though he’d already flipped through them at least once. Maybe twice.

“So lay your judgments on me, Cas.”

Cas looked up.

“You want to ask me why I’m in here, and not with my mother and Sam.”

Cas turned back to the pictures. “No, I wasn’t going to ask that at all.” He looked up again. Focused on Dean. “But since you bring it up, I assume it’s on your mind. You’re not a difficult human to read, Dean. You usually say what you mean.”

Dean leaned his head back on the cabinets, looked up at the ceiling. “Sam deserves more time with her. Like, serious one-on-one time.”

“I get that.”

Dean uncrossed his legs. “Then what?”

Cas’s eyes grew softer, if that was possible. “I don’t disagree with your decision to give Sam time and space with your mother. If that’s what they need, then that’s good. And it’s understandable if you need to be alone. But … I question your rationale.”

 _Well, I need time alone right now_ , Dean thought. _So march your feathery ass on outta here and let me have it_.

But to his credit, he didn’t say these things. (Thank God he didn’t say them—he’s glad now that he held back, that he wasn’t _always_ a dick who automatically said the shittiest thing that popped into his mind.)

He said, “Huh? What’s my ‘rationale’?”

“That Sam deserves more time. More time with her than you do.”

Dean looked up at the ceiling again, but this time he rolled his eyes. “I just explained this, Cas. Sam was a baby. I wasn’t.”

“Dean, you were _four_.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“You can’t quantify time with a mother. Even I know that.”

Dean closed his eyes. Tried not to sigh.

“Sam had you, Dean. He’s always had you. But you …”

Dean opened his eyes but didn’t look at Cas.

“She was ripped away from you when you were just—” He looked away. “Given your age at that time, and what we now know about childhood comprehension … what happened to her—it must have been your first memory.”

Dean picked up another bottle to peel off the label. “Something like that.”

Cas put a hand on his arm, but Dean just continued to pick at the label.

Dean fixed his gaze on his empty bottle. “Is this where you tell me to get my ass in there? To go be with both of them? Because I’m overcomplicating things, or whatever? As humans tend to do?”

“No, it’s—I shouldn’t have said that.” Cas didn’t take his hand from Dean’s arm.

Dean scrunched up the peeled-off label in his palm. Trying to distract himself from the tears gathering at the corners of his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Dean. It wasn’t the right thing to say.”

“It wasn’t wrong, though. It shouldn’t be this hard.”

Cas withdrew his hand from Dean’s arm. He gathered the photographs in his hand and set the small stack aside ever so gently. “I’ll be the first to admit: I don’t know a thing about this—this family shit. But if I’ve learned anything over the past few years—from you and Sam—it’s that family shit is … _really hard_.”

Dean wants another beer. Anything to keep from thinking about the fact that he’s two seconds away from breaking down.

“I know you feel like you have to hide how you feel from Sam. And I know your reasons. But you don’t have to hide it from me. You were cheated out of a mother, just as he was. The amount of time you had compared to the amount of time he did? It’s immaterial. You were both robbed.”

And with that, Dean started to cry.

Now Cas put his hand on Dean’s shoulder.

He looked up at Cas, his vision blurry. When his voice came, it was barely louder than a whisper. Rawer than he expected. Not as raw as he felt.

“We’re fucking strangers to her, Cas. Me and Sammy. To our mom. And I can’t—I can’t fix that. For him _or_ me.”

Cas squeezed his shoulder. “No, you can’t. And I’m so sorry.”

Dean pulled up his knees and set his elbows against them and cried into his hands. He cried for a while. Cas sat there with him, on the cold floor, and kept his hand on Dean’s shoulder. 

Some minutes later—Dean wasn’t sure how much time passed—he collected himself, wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his sleeve, and sat upright again. Calmed his breathing.

Cas took his hand from Dean’s shoulder.

“All right,” Dean said, putting his hand down to push himself from the floor. Cas got up and reached out to help Dean stand, but Dean shrugged off the offer. “I’m okay.” He bent over to gather the beer bottles for the recycling bin. Cas picked up the small stack of photographs.

When Dean had gotten rid of the bottles, Cas handed him back the photographs. “You should rest,” he said.

“Thanks, Cas. You should too.” He patted Cas on the shoulder—the kind of “bro touch” that comprised most of their physical interaction. “You know Cas—”

Cas’s eyes met his.

“What happened with you, with Jimmy Novak, with Claire … it’s not the same thing. As me and Sammy losing our mom. It just isn’t.”

Cas’s face tensed. “I don’t know about that, Dean. It had the same effect on her. At the end of the day, does the reason really matter? I took her father from her. He’d be alive if it weren’t for me. She’d have a family.”

Dean kept his hand on Cas’s shoulder. “Yeah, the reason matters. Averting the apocalypse mattered. It might not matter to her right now, but it will. I know this. Trust me. If me and Sam had that kind of knowledge about our mom—if we’d known she’d given up her body to a being that saved a lot of people? Well.” Now he _did_ sigh. “Yeah, we still would have been pissed-off teenagers. But it would have been different.”

Cas raised his eyes to look at Dean, and he looked so sad and unconvinced that Dean knew he didn’t believe a word he’d just said.

Now he wishes he had that moment back. He wishes he could have said, “I love you, Cas.” But he didn’t say those words to anyone, not even Sammy.

He wishes he’d said _I love you_ to Cas every goddamn day.

*

He feels like he’s been searching for weeks. He can’t find Cas anywhere. But now he’s more convinced than ever that someone is fucking with him.

For instance: he’s driving Baby around a stretch of countryside that looks like backwoods Wisconsin, and seemingly out of nowhere a Gas-n-Sip emerges, nestled against a patch of forest. Dean pulls up even though there’s no need (Baby doesn’t run out of gas on this side of paradise, and Dean is never hungry or thirsty or in need of a bathroom) and goes inside.

The Gas-n-Sip is brightly lit and lovingly stocked. Just as it was when Cas worked there. He winces when he remembers how he turned Cas out of the bunker. And then, subsequently, how he mocked his job. He doesn’t know why he was so rotten about the guy just trying to make a living—maybe it was something about the way Cas was just so damn sincere about his job, so nerdy. Everyone who worked a minimum wage shit job knew you didn’t actually do a _good job_ at it, just as you didn’t ask the teacher if she forgot to assign homework. No, when you worked at a convenience store, you got high in the backroom and “borrowed” from the cash register. And quit before they could fire you.

You certainly didn’t go tooling around in your uniform in your off hours. As a teenager, Dean would have died an unholy death before he let any girl in town catch a glimpse of him in his Burger King shirt.

Dean wanders the aisles at the immaculate Gas-n-Sip. It’s deserted. No one’s working there, and yet it’s stocked and clean and well-kept as if a very diligent manager has just slipped out the backdoor to take out the trash. There’s music piping in through the store— “Angel of the Morning.” “Very funny, Cas,” he says to the empty aisles. “Yeah, you know I got a weakness for the Juice Newton version.”

He walks toward the back of the store, checking out the frozen section, which emanates a slight chill. “Cas?”

Nothing.

“Cas, are you—?” 

A thought occurs to him, and not a welcome one: what if Cas _is_ the Gas-n-Sip? Maybe this is how he’s rebuilt heaven, by becoming the inanimate architecture he admired while he was on earth. Christ, maybe he’ll become the bunker next. Or the house where Jack was born.

Dean sees the slushie machine, churning away in the corner. Working perfectly, even though there’s no one around to drink what it has to offer. He draws closer to it. Bends at the waist so that he’s eye-level with the levers. “Cas,” he whispers. At the slushie machine.

Okay, now this is just stupid. He’s really losing his mind.

He straightens just as “Angel of the Morning” ends and another song begins. Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is his cue to get the fuck out.

In his car, he turns the ignition and flips on the radio, trying not to think about how long it’s been since that Lady Gaga song was popular and everywhere and in-fucking-escapable. 2008? ’09?

Around the time he met Cas.

On his car’s radio: Jackson Browne. That’s more like it. “ _Somebody’s calling after somebody, somebody turns a corner out of sight,_ ” Browne sings. “ _Looking for somebody, somewhere in the night_.”

Okay, no, that is _not_ more like it. Dean turns the radio off.

He pulls out of the parking lot and heads in the direction opposite of the one he originally intended.

*

Mary and John share a large cabin-style home at the edge of a lake. When Dean visits, he’s struck by how it’s very much just like his parents to live in such a place—and also very not like them at all. It’s rustic and crunchy, like something a couple of Vermont hippies would spend their entire life-savings to buy, putting in solar panels and a well-tended greenhouse. And his parents are not Vermont hippies.

But the inside of the home is very much them—no fancy fixtures or snazzy splashback tiles. His dad keeps a pool table in the center of the living room, and his mother has her own area upstairs. Dean suspects that the house is large so they can share it properly—so they can retreat to their respective corners to be apart when the need arises. (And knowing them, it must arise fairly often.)

He’s glad his mom is in the living room, sitting in the window seat, reading a book. He needs to talk with her. He also knows that, like him, his mother isn’t one for small-talk or niceties or an offer of tea and cookies. So after they hug hello, he just cuts right to it: “I’m a dick. I mean, I was a dick. When I was alive.”

She looks at him quizzically and doesn’t sit back down.

“And I’m probably still a dick even though I’m dead, let’s be honest.”

“Dean, what is this—what are you talking about?”

“Mom, it’s Cas.”

Now she looks even more confused. “What about him?”

“I haven’t seen him _anywhere_ , Mom. And I’ve prayed and searched and been everywhere and, like, nothing. But I keep seeing all these weird _signs_. Like—”

He thinks about sharing his theory that Cas is a slushie machine or a thunderstorm or a Lady Gaga song, but even in death, he knows it’s bonkers.

“You were right,” he says. “I didn’t treat him right. When I was alive. When he was alive. When we were both … alive.”

Mary shakes her head. “Dean, what are you _talking_ about?”

“It’s why he hasn’t—” He puts his hands in his pockets. “We get the heaven we deserve, right? And I don’t deserve Cas.”

Mary looks all the more confused, if that’s even possible, but he plows forward anyway. “The day when you told me to be careful with his feelings because—because he liked me and took me seriously, and I just could not get it through my dumb head what you were talking about, even though I knew deep down what you were saying, and—” He takes a deep breath.

“Dean.” She takes a step toward him, but he holds out his hand as if to stop her.

“I was awful to him, Mom. I was such a shit. The things I said to him after you died. I blamed him. I blamed _Cas_. For your death. I blamed him because he said he knew there was something wrong with Jack, but—I told him he was dead to me. I said these terrible things and he just walked out, and I didn’t stop him, and—” He’s nearly hyperventilating now. Christ, he’s a basket-case, even in death.

“Dean. Dean, come here and sit down.” Mary gestures to the couch behind them, sets her hand on his elbow to guide him. They both sit. “I can’t follow what you’re talking about. So calm down. And just explain to me what this is about.”

Dean takes several deep breaths and attempts to begin again, outlining the circumstances surrounding her death, the fight he had with Cas, and Cas’s departure from the bunker. “We—we made up. Sort of. We were in purgatory together, and …”

“Wait. You were in purgatory together?”

“It’s a long story. But yeah. We were there looking for this—it really isn’t important.” He takes another breath. “Anyway, we got separated, I prayed to him, I apologized. We found each other and got out. But …”

Mary folds her hands and leans forward.

“We got back to the bunker that night, and, I don’t know. I kissed him.”

“You kissed Castiel?”

Dean swallows. “Yeah.”

“And?”

Dean looks at his mother. Now it’s his turn to be confused. “I kissed _Cas_ , Mom. My best friend. And not on the cheek. I kissed him like—” He stops, wondering how much detail he has to use here. Does he have to mention there was tongue involved? A little bit of force? (He thinks about Cas’s turn as the pizza man. It wasn’t _quite_ like that. Okay, it wasn’t like that at all. _Too bad it wasn’t like that_ , he thinks now, not without a small degree of wistfulness.)

Mary still looks confused, but she also looks contemplative. A crease forms between her eyes. “So you kissed Cas … and what? It was awkward afterward?”

“No! No, it wasn’t like that. I mean, I don’t think it was. We just—pretended it never happened.”

“Okay.”

He wonders: has he just come out to his mother? But come out as … _what_? And does “coming out” as a concept even exist in heaven? He hasn’t given it much thought. On earth, during those last months he was alive, he would lie awake at night and wonder what possessed him to kiss Cas in the first place, what triggered him to feel that way. About a man. He'd find himself uncomfortably hard, just thinking about.

After Cas was dead—and when he wasn’t sobbing into his pillow, grieving Cas like he’d never grieved for anyone in his life (he didn’t grieve that deeply for his mother or his father or Sam, but they could never know this)—he’d stop to allow himself just to feel it: this desire, this attraction to Cas. It amazed him. It existed beyond any self-definition he’d entertained previously. It wasn’t like it rendered all definitions of sexuality completely moot; it’s like it just existed beside them.

Luckily, his mother doesn’t seem to care about sexuality either.

He takes another deep breath to continue onward. “Everything went back to normal. Like, as normal as it could be, anyway, with Chuck fucking deleting entire galaxies. We never talked about it.” He catches her eyes. “Until he was dying.”

Mary presses her palms together. Leans forward. And Dean just comes out with it, tells her everything. Cas’s confession, his dying speech, how he’d wept. How he’d conjured the Empty, which had destroyed him, tearing him apart as Dean watched, reducing his physical body to a sludge of nothingness.

Leaving nothing but an empty dungeon that smelled like death.

Dean can’t look at his mother because he knows that she, also, is sad. He can feel this. He’s looking down at his hands, his vision blurring with tears, and Mary takes both of his hands in hers.

“So you see, Mom,” he chokes out, reaching the end of the story, “I’m a total asshole. Cas—he deserved so much better. And now I roll up in heaven, just expecting him to be here, but … of course he’s not here. I didn’t earn that. I don’t … deserve him.”

She squeezes his hands.

He swallows. “I don’t deserve to be with him. Not here.”

She sighs. “That’s not true. And besides, you haven’t even been here that long, Dean. Give him some time.”

“I’ve been here for days, Mom. _Weeks_.”

His mother peers at him, incredulous. She almost smiles. “Dean. You just got here.”

He shakes his head, mostly to himself.

“Have you tried praying to him?”

“I’ve been praying my ass off!”

“Okay, okay.” She’s trying to calm him now. “Keep in mind that time moves differently in heaven. I know—it’s hard to get used to at first. It was hard for me at first, too. It went very slowly, and then it went fast. Once I saw Jack—”

“You’ve seen Jack?”

“I saw him a while back. Around the time heaven changed.” She smiled. “He asked for my forgiveness. There was no need, of course.” She paused. “Just as there’s no need for you to ask Castiel to forgive you.”

He asks—can’t _not_ ask—the crucial question. “Have you seen Cas?”

“Not yet,” she says, smiling. “But I know he’s around.”

“Right,” Dean says, trying not to roll his eyes. “In the rocks and the trees and the Juice Newton muzak.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He sits back on the sofa, willing his tears to dry.

“He was right about you.”

He levels his gaze at her.

“You’re a good man, Dean. I just wish you could see that.” She pauses. “What he said—it wasn’t wrong. You seem to think the worst of yourself …. Well, I just wish I’d been there.”

“When Cas died? It wasn’t a lot of fun, Mom. It was like _Schindler’s List_ crossed with _Sophie’s Choice_ but with more drinking and fighting and puking and shitting bricks. Poor Sam.”

“No, I don’t mean—” She tucks a wisp of hair behind her ear. “Yes, I wish I could have been there for you after Cas’s death, Dean. But I’m talking before that. I wish I could have been there earlier. Years earlier. I missed so much, with you two boys. I missed the opportunity to build you up. The world is a terrible place. It tears you down. So much. But mothers are supposed to counteract that, Dean. And I didn’t. I wasn’t there.”

He sniffles.

“I wasn’t there when you lost a baseball game or had a mean teacher or got mixed up with a bully. I wasn’t there to help you through your first broken heart. I wasn’t there to tell you that the world sucks and that the bad things that happen to you aren’t necessarily your fault. I’m sad about that, Dean. You needed a mother.” She pauses. “You _really_ needed a mother.”

His tears are hastening, so he needs to talk quickly. “Mom. You know—you know that me and Sammy—we never—we never, like, _resented_ you for that. right? Right? You have to know that.”

“Of course I know that. But it doesn’t make it easier. And when I got back? You boys—” She stops.

“What?”

“You were just … so _sad_. Even when you were trying your best not to be. Even when you were making small-talk about things like breakfast or television shows. You both tried so hard for my sake to come across as happy and well-adjusted and normal. But it was clear that you weren’t. Neither of you were okay. You were a mess. And still I walked away from you.”

He remembers that day. How Sammy was able to hug her goodbye but he couldn’t. He was devastated. To have his mother back, and then to have to watch her walk out the door. Willingly.

“I’m sorry for that, Dean. It’s one of my biggest regrets.”

He waits a moment. “It’s okay, Mom. I know it must have been—I mean, you hadn’t been on the planet since Sally Ride was orbiting the earth. You didn’t want to come back. You were forced to. By Amara. It’s like … when we had Jack.”

The parallel occurs to him now as it never did before. He hadn’t asked to be Jack’s parent, hadn’t signed up for that. No, that was Cas’s choice—and a shitty choice at that, Dean had thought at the time. But Cas died just as Jack came into the world, and Dean did everything in his power to get rid of Jack. When that didn’t work, he did everything he could to shirk his responsibilities.

He doesn’t have to wonder how his mother felt when she was dropped back on earth with two thirty-something grown-ass sons—two needy man-children who wanted her to be something that she wasn’t, that she hadn’t signed up for. He already knows.

“I still regret it, Dean. Just as you have your regrets. Even so, we don’t love each other any less. Why do you think things with Cas … would be so different? That he wouldn’t love you as completely as you love him? Or wouldn’t want to see you? Surely you know that’s not true. Just look around at this place. He and Jack made it for you.”

Dean’s thinking through the implications of what his mother’s saying when he catches some movement out of the corner of his eye. His father.

“What’s going on?” John says as he steps into the living room.

Dean looks up at the ceiling, which has a spinning fan, but he doesn’t take his hand away from his mother’s.

He wonders how much his dad heard. Then again, he doesn’t really care at this point. If his dad thinks he’s a fruit? Oh well. He’s dead. They’re both dead.

“John,” Mary says, her voice thin. “Why don’t you wait outside.”

“No, no need for that,” Dean says. Now he does withdraw his hand to wipe away the rest of the tears. Rises to his feet. “I’m on my way out.”

“On your way to what?” John says, not budging from the mouth of the living room. “We’ve barely gotten to see you since you got here, and now you’re leaving again?”

Dean says nothing. Sammy would just push past the guy and go on his merry way, but Dean’s never been able to do that.

“John,” Mary says, her voice straining against impatience. “He really has to go.”

John’s face betrays the smallest flicker of hurt, but he recovers. “Well let me walk you out, then.”

Dean agrees to this. He hugs his mother goodbye and she whispers in his ear, “This will all work out, Dean. I promise.”

Outside, on his way to his car, Dean expects to get an earful. _We don’t ever see you and now you show up to upset your mother and then bolt. What the hell is wrong with you?_

Instead, John just points to his car and says something complimentary about it, something bland and noncommittal. Then he turns to square off with Dean. “It would be nice if you could stay longer. Get caught up on things.”

“I’ll come back soon, Dad. I’ve just got …”

“Other things to do, I know.”

“It’s not like that,” he tries to explain.

John tucks his hands in his jacket pockets, seems to falter a little. “You’re looking for this, um, friend. This Castiel. I know.”

Dean just stands there. So Dad _had_ been listening. He can’t look him in the face so he focuses on a thread unraveling from the shoulder of his jacket. It’s funny—even in heaven, clothes get tattered and torn. Loved. 

“Why don’t you look for him the old-fashioned way?”

Dean blinks, confused. Isn’t that what he’s been doing? “I’ve been everywhere.”

“I’m talking about research. The way you used to do things. The thing you’re very, very good at.”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head to himself. What the fuck is his father talking about? (And how is his father telling him he’s _good_ at anything?)

“There’s a library in town,” John explains. “Just up that way.”

“No, there’s—” Dean’s been to town. He never saw any library.

“It’s huge, Dean. Archives and manuscripts. The entire history of heaven and earth. It used to be classified, but now it's accessible to anyone. This Castiel is an angel. There must be records about him.” John pauses. “I could go with you.”

“You should stay with Mom.”

“She probably wouldn’t mind losing me for a few hours. But no, I get it. This is something you have to do on your own.”

Dean approaches the car, takes his keys out of his pocket, and then stops. Faces his dad once more. “Cas isn’t just my friend, Dad.”

John nods, his hands still in his pockets. “I know. He’s, um, what do you kids call it these days?” He takes one hand out of his pocket and scratches the back of his head. Shrugs. “Your, um, partner?”

Dean almost can’t contemplate this moment. It’s theater of the fucking absurd. Here he is, talking to the mighty John Winchester about his angel partner. _Male_ angel partner. Male angel would-be lover? In a previous lifetime, he’d have rather walked in on one of his parents masturbating to _Fifty Shades of Gray_.

Now he really doesn’t give a hot fuck.

“Something like that,” he says. _Partner_ has always felt cold and clinical to him. Like a job description.

“Well,” John says, reaching out his hand to pat Dean’s shoulder. “You go find him. Okay?”

*

 _Earlier still_.

They move from the rehab facility to another place altogether. “Transitional housing,” Gabriel jokingly calls it. “A halfway house.”

But part of it quickly becomes a haven for a small clutch of angels who love humanity. Who enjoyed the human world and miss their time there.

Who are just as homesick as Cas is.

They christen this place “the fratway house” (Gabriel's idea). Several angels decide to stay there fulltime, Cas among them. He has a small room on the third floor that’s just as simple and austere as the one he had in the bunker, and it is there that he learns to rest. Angels technically don’t need sleep, but Cas is still exhausted. Tired from the Empty? From all this change? He doesn’t know.

Metatron busies himself in the house’s small library, getting irritated when others play loud music. But too fucking bad—they all love music. And pool. They have a pool table, which Benjamin commandeers to the point that they have to distract him to take his cue just so someone else can play. 

They do this very human thing. This thing called _hanging out_. Not working. Just being there. Sometimes binge-watching Netflix. They watch episodes of _The Office_ , and Anna explains a lot of the jokes, since she was human for a long time. Gabriel often holds court in the front room, joking and laughing with anyone who’s around. He’s sort of the center of the enterprise, the one you can always find if you feel like chatting. The confident older brother who shows newcomers the ropes.

Hannah often stops by, and this has become a source of amusement for certain angels—because she doesn’t stop by to just hang out. She clearly comes to see Castiel.

“I don’t know what it is about you, Castiel,” Metatron says one night after Cas has walked Hannah to the door to see her off. He’s sitting with Daniel, a bottle of whiskey between them, along with a chessboard.

“What do you mean?”

“I look at you and I see—” He gestures to Cas’s true form. “A pretty bland dude. Really nondescript. About as charismatic as a glass of milk. And yet.” He shrugs.

Cas levels his best blank stare.

“He means you have sex appeal,” Daniel explains.

“Thank you, Daniel,” Metatron says. “Thank you for spelling that out for our friend who could somehow figure out what made the Empty tick, and yet can’t see Hannah’s longing for him, which is so huge it’s written in the sky.”

Daniel just looks at him and shrugs, sheepishly. “I think he may be right. She’s got a crush.”

“I mean, she’s clearly got a screw or two loose. But still, Castiel. You gonna move on this girl or what?”

Cas doesn’t even bother to roll his eyes—it’s not worth it. “She stops by to work with Benjamin.” Hannah and Benjamin are spearheading an initiative, a kind of prime directive for other angels who will someday be sent to earth. It’s called Angels for the Ethical Treatment of Vessels.

“Keep telling yourself that, Casanova.”

Casanova. That’s his new nickname. He has Metatron to thank for it.

He slumps out of the room. Even in this new version of heaven, Metatron is the most annoying celestial being he’s encountered in his three-point-six billion years of being an angel.

He’s fond of Hannah, sure. But he’s disappointed she hasn’t opted to live in the house. Not because he has feelings for her (he doesn’t—and he doesn’t believe that she has feelings for him, despite all the jokes and jabs and nods he pretends not to understand).

He’s disappointed because—well, though she clearly cares about humanity, she doesn’t embrace it the way some of the other angels do. She still keeps herself at a slight distance.

He retreats to his room. Closes the door over and thinks about Dean.

He hopes Dean is okay. And Sam. Moving onward and upward. Putting him and the last twelve years in the rearview. The last time he talked to Jack about them, Jack assured him that they were both fine. Still living in the bunker, but clearly moving on. Rebuilding their lives. That’s good—that’s all he wants.

He still isn’t strong enough to look in on them, to be able to monitor what they’re doing. Whatever the Empty did to him—well, it was deep. Penetrating. Enervating. Not something he can just get over. “It inflicted psychic damage,” Jack told him, last time they met. “The only cure for that is time and rest.”

When he and Hannah first got caught up with each other in rehab, she wanted to apologize for that business on earth. With Efram and Jonah. There was no need, he said, wanting to dispel that ugliness. He’d already had a similar conversation with Balthazar and it had pretty much gone the same way. “You got me out of the Empty, so we’re even,” Balthazar said quickly, clearly not in the mood to dwell.

Castiel understood the sentiment. It certainly gelled with the purpose of this new heaven: You took the forgiveness that others gave you and passed it on. Again and again.

After they left rehab, he and Hannah kept in touch. And she started coming by the fratway house often.

That afternoon, Hannah came by. They walked through the main rooms, where others were playing pool and cards and listening to music. 

“Did I see a cat?” Hannah asked when Cas led her outside to the terrace.

“It’s possible,” Cas said, shutting the door behind them. “Samandriel is partial to cats. He talked about getting one.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m not a huge fan of cats either,” Cas said. “Difficult to understand. Though on earth they do an excellent job of controlling rodent populations. And people like videos that feature them.” He pauses. “I never understood that.”

“I didn’t either,” Hannah said, looking out at the green fields around them, heaven in its newest iteration. “This is beautiful.”

“It is.” Cas doesn’t like to brag about his son’s creation, but most of the time he doesn’t have to. Jack’s creation speaks for itself. No need to hang finger paintings on the refrigerator door—Jack skipped that stage. 

“It’s like I didn’t know what we were missing until I saw this. And with so many of us back from the Empty, heaven’s stronger than it’s been in centuries. We can incorporate so many souls.” She turned to look at Cas. “And that’s thanks to you.”

He tried not look exasperated. He hates how other angels credit him for this. As if he did it alone. _On purpose_. “I played a role in depopulating heaven of its angels in the first place.”

“A lot of others played a role, Castiel. A role they still won’t admit to. But you’re different in that you tried to set things right.”

“I had a lot to make up for.”

“You _always_ tried. It wasn’t for nothing.” She gave him a small smile. “What’s next for you?”

Already he felt tired. Angels like Hannah—they exhaust him. They always have to be _doing_ something. He appreciates the fratway house for the way it allows angels to just be.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, Hannah. I’m a soldier. I’ll go where I’m needed most. But in any case,” he says, sitting on the bench overlooking the valley beneath them, “I’m not back to full capacity yet. I wouldn’t be of use to anyone right now.”

Hannah sat down next to him. “You don’t think you’ll do a tour on earth now?”

“Definitely not _now_ ,” he said. “I doubt I’d make it down there in one piece.”

“But … someday?”

He cast a glance at her. “I—I have no idea, Hannah. Why are you asking?”

She sighed and sat back on the bench. “I’m sorry. I’m just—I’m terrible at communicating with you, Castiel. It’s never been my strong suit. I have trouble with metaphors.”

“I don’t do metaphors very well myself, Hannah. It’s something I struggled with during my time on earth.”

“Not like the rest of us, though. You understand humans … pretty well.”

“It took a while.”

She sneaked a glance at him. “Do you miss it? I mean … _them_.”

He didn’t say anything. Where to even begin? He misses it all—he misses everything. He misses passing those long nights in the bunker, reading or looking at the internet while he waited for Sam and Dean to wake up so they could begin the day. He misses watching over Dean while he slept, which he did all the time, even though Dean told him not to, said it was “just creepy.” He misses the smell of food cooking, even if he didn’t eat it. He misses the road. He misses driving his _own_ car. He misses text messages, even though he never understood the point—why take the time to write when you could just speak?

Sometimes he even misses _Crowley_ —how the fuck is that possible? It’s possible because he knows it’s not Crowley he misses but what he represents—those years with Sam and Dean.

He misses when Jack was still a boy, on earth, finding his way. Soul or no soul, he loved him all the same.

He misses human emotions. At first he couldn’t understand them—the extremes of anger and sadness and despair. And desire. What an awful way to live! But when he let himself feel those things, he finally understood that the extremes meant something mattered to you. And that it was okay to let things matter, to invest yourself.

He couldn’t say any of this to Hannah. He’s not quite sure she’d understand. And perhaps that’s the problem—no one understands. No one but Jack, and he’s busy.

“You know, Castiel?” she said, and now her voice was halting. Diffident. “I mean, what you did for us—it was unimaginable. We’ll never be able to thank you.” Her hand brushed his. “But … maybe being an angel isn’t so bad. I mean, we’re your family too.”

He looked up at her, and her face looked so sad that he wished he could just touch her to take that sadness away. “Hannah. _Hannah_. I never thought—I never thought being an angel was bad.”

Her gaze met his. She seemed both disbelieving and terribly sincere.

“I always thought of you as family. _Always_. All of you.”

“The same way you thought of the Winchesters?”

As if realizing she’d asked too much, she withdrew her hands, set them on her lap. “I’m sorry.”

He looked out at the landscape around them, so much beauty, and knew there was no answer he could give her that she wanted to hear.

*

So now Hannah has left and he’s in his small room, trying to collect himself. And trying not to think about Sam and Dean. His family. Moving on without him. It hurts—it hurts so much. And he knows they’ll be here soon (he doesn’t want them to be here _too_ soon—their lives are precious to him), but he knows he’ll never be happy here. Among other angels. No matter how hard he tries and tries.

He knows that happiness isn't in the having, it's in just being—he has the Empty to thank for that bit of perspective. But _just being_ is difficult right now when _being_ means that he’ll always be part of this world—the celestial realm—and Sam and Dean will always be part of the other. When they arrive, there will be a distance. He won’t know Dean in this world as he knew him in the other. Dean will have had a life. A life without Cas. Better memories. Better times to reflect on. He hopes so, but …

The realization makes him ache. It’s what he fought for, and it’s right. But it still pains him.

He steadies himself against his desk.

Suddenly there’s a knock on his door. And because it’s closed over—not closed—it swings open.

“Hey Casanova,” Gabriel says from the doorway. “ _Mad Men_ in ten. You in?”

Cas tries to look up just enough to gesture to Gabriel that he’ll be there, but it’s no use. Gabriel sees his face.

“Hey,” Gabriel says, coming into his room and closing the door behind him. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.” He angles himself away from Gabriel and tries to wipe his tears away. “ _Mad Men_ , I know, I’ll be—”

Gabriel puts both his hands on his shoulders, turns him around and enfolds him in a warm hug. “It’s okay,” he says, even though he can’t possibly know that because he doesn’t know what “it” is. And frankly, neither does Cas. “It’s okay, bro.”

“It’s not,” Cas whispers. “Angels don’t cry.” Or, at least they're not supposed to. Cas never used to cry. These days, he can't stop.

“They don’t?” Gabriel says, pulling back to look at him. “I guess I’ll have to turn in my angel card. You should have seen me when I watched _The Notebook_ last week. Metatron took pictures. For purposes of blackmail, I’m guessing.”

Cas starts laughing, he can’t help it. It feels better to laugh—better than it does to cry. And that’s the point, he supposes. To pretend, just for a moment, that everything is all right.


	5. Chapter 5

Time passes and he grows stronger. He gets well enough to venture out of the fratway house to see more of the angels’ side of the celestial realm, which his human-obsessed friends have dubbed Wing Town. It’s meant to be a bit pejorative—to lightly mock the other angels who are, deep down inside, still scared of humanity. Of course, they’d never admit they’re scared—scared of _humanity_? The idea is absurd! No, instead they’d give you some line about “maintaining a healthy distance” from humanity to “preserve the sacred duties they’ve been assigned.”

They do boring things like crunch numbers, run statistics and figure out how many human souls have crossed over and how many are still in the veil, and where they should put them all.

Cas has to go through Wing Town to see Jack, who often summons him to get feedback about additions and revisions to this new heaven. On his way there and back, he sometimes runs into angels he’d rather not see—Ishim, Naomi, Uriel, Dumah. Even though heaven is all about forgiveness—and Cas does indeed forgive everyone, just as he himself wants to be forgiven—he genuinely does not want to be in their company.

But one day he runs into Ambriel and strikes up a conversation. He tells her where he’s living. Curious about the fratway house, she follows him home and he gives her the tour. “So this is what you guys do all day? Nothing?”

“Doing nothing is … actually pretty interesting,” he says. “Doing nothing is doing something.” They’re standing in the main room with the pool table, which is uncharacteristically empty.

“Where is everybody?”

“Resting. Maybe sleeping.”

“ _Sleeping_? Angels don’t sleep, Castiel.”

“Maybe not,” he says. He explains that he’s not sure that the thing they call “sleep” is actually real sleep or just some form of relaxation. But whatever it is, it’s deeply restorative.

“You’re so funny, Cas.”

“And never when I’m intending to be.”

The house’s inhabitants begin to stir awake, and soon enough, Benjamin blinks himself downstairs, picks up the pool cue, and breaks.

Cas and Ambriel go into the art room, where they find Adina sitting on a stool in front of an easel. She pokes her head out from behind the canvas to smile hello.

Somewhere in the house, someone starts playing music. _“Shiny happy people holding hands …”_

“That song is very Daniel,” he says as he leads Ambriel out the backdoor and onto the terrace. But instead of staying on the terrace, they descend the steps to take a stroll around the backyard.

He’s no longer surprised that he’s come to know the intricacies of his housemates’ lives—or that they enjoy a degree of emotional intimacy. He knows that Gabriel is crestfallen—even depressed—that he hasn’t been able to mend fences with Michael and Raphael; he knows that Anna once dreamed of becoming an architect and a mother in the human world—she wanted to have a family and an important career. He understands that Abner is quietly devastated because Gadreel needs “time apart” and has gone to a separate part of heaven for a “clean slate.”

Metatron still irritates everybody, but it’s clear to Cas that they tolerate him because they know his unpleasantness stems from his deep insecurities—his awareness that he failed as an angel, as God’s scribe, and as God’s replacement. He’s intensely self-hating, and Cas understands that.

And about Cas, all of them know how large the Winchesters loomed in his life. How much he misses them. Aches for them. He doesn’t need to spell it out for them; when he talks about them, they know.

They don’t like to talk about their time in the Empty. No one does. It’s taken Cas a long time to remember what even _happened_ in the Empty, and how he got them all out.

There’s the official story, which he knows by heart: He figured out the torture was all an illusion, a shared dream, and was able to convince Crowley and the others not to trust what they were seeing and feeling. Crowley was then able to tap into his connection to Rowena so she could wake the demons.

Once the demons were awake, it was the beginning of the end for the Empty. And once the Empty loosened its grip on angels, and Cas was able to connect to Jack …

But he doesn’t remember the finer details. Doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to put himself back in that place where he had the realization that the entire thing was a dream—because it’s the same place where angels tore down the walls each night to stab him, flay him, burn him alive.

After it was all over, and they were all safe again, other angels were curious about his strange alliance to the former king and current queen of hell. “That was some seriously fucked-up Machiavellian shit you pulled,” Balthazar said once when they were still in rehab. “Aren’t you the social actor. You have got game, my friend. I shouldn’t have underestimated you.”

But he hadn’t been acting. How to explain to Balthazar that he trusted Crowley far more than he trusted most angels? That Crowley was an evil little bastard, but not one without some classiness?

He’s gotten used to saying the same things, over and over again. _I took a chance and got lucky. I’d tangled with the Empty before, so I knew its weaknesses._

Eventually he started resorting to Winchesterisms: _I knew we’d find a way. There’s always a way. We just had to keep trying._

He’s not in the backyard with Ambriel for a minute before she gets right to the point: “Are you still in love with Dean Winchester?”

He has to admit that he’s partial to angels like this—angels who are painfully blunt and artless. As he once was.

Now he’s a little cagier. “Who’s asking?”

“Well, me.”

“Who told you I was in love with him?” The bunker was warded; no angel could have heard his confession. Is Ambriel on some kind of fishing expedition?

“What are you talking about?” she says. “Everyone knows you’re in love with him. It’s like climate change—not even worth debating anymore. I’m sure it’ll hit the next update of the _Angel Almanac_.”

Maybe she’s on a fishing expedition; maybe she isn’t. In either case, he just doesn’t care anymore. Doesn’t care what angels think of him.

He says, “Ambriel, my feelings for Dean Winchester notwithstanding, he’s a human being.”

“So?”

“He’s on earth, having a life. As it always should have been.”

“He’ll be here soon enough. Humans don’t last very long. And then you two can be together again.” She smiles. The idea seems to please her.

Her words make him wince. He knows all humans die and that Dean, also, will die. But the thought of the human world without Dean in it is just … so _sad_ —sadder than his current state of separation from Dean.

“You know it’s forbidden for angels and humans to be together, Ambriel.”

She steps back. “I’m sorry, but what?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“You take up for nephilim, rebel against heaven, and renege on a deal with the Empty. I don’t think of you as a stickler for rules.”

Like so many angels, Ambriel is exhausting. How many times does he have to explain that he didn’t rebel for the sake of rebelling? That he didn’t “tear up the script” for shits and giggles?

“Ambriel—all those things—I did them because I felt they were right. Sometimes they _weren’t_ right, and I was wrong, and there was a steep price to pay. But I didn’t break rules just because I felt like breaking them.”

He looks down at the grass. They start walking again. “The apocalypse was wrong, so I worked with Sam and Dean to stop it. I felt deeply that the nephil child was special, so I didn’t kill him.” He pauses. “I’d never felt right about killing nephilim to begin with. It felt indecent. I just … didn’t allow myself to acknowledge that until I lived among humans.” He glances back at her. “As for the Empty.” He tips his face toward her. “Well, none of you should have been there. None of _us_.”

Ambriel returns his gaze. “Are you finished, Castiel?”

He tucks his arms behind him. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be so …”

“Insufferable? Moralizing? Pedantic?”

He raises an eyebrow.

“It would be very weird for you to break all these big rules because breaking them was the right thing to do, while not breaking a fairly minor one because … well, who knows your reasons.”

“Ambriel—” He sighs while collecting himself. He doesn’t even know where to begin. The human world is what’s weirder than theirs when it comes to these things. Complicated. If angels desire companionship (and most don't, at least not on that level), they just pair off.

Angels with little exposure to humans don’t understand: You can love someone, but there’s no guarantee they’ll love you back. There are vagaries of attraction; of sexuality, of something called “sparks.” Or “butterflies.” All of which he knows he’s experienced with Dean, sure. But he just doesn’t know if Dean ever felt the same way—if he _can_ feel the same way. About a male. About a male celestial. About _Cas_.

He says, “I’m sure Dean Winchester will have other things to do. Once he gets here.”

Ambriel grins again. “You’re so funny, Castiel.”

*

After Ambriel leaves, he trudges the three flights up to his room. He’s still not strong enough to teleport there, just as he’s not strong enough to teleport his way around Wing Town. His wings are still broken, still sagging against his back.

It’s damn frustrating to not be able to avoid certain things, like climbing steps and having awkward stop-and-chats with certain angels.

He pushes the door open to find Jack sitting on the bed. Jack rises to his feet as soon as he sees Cas. He doesn’t look happy.

Cas knows immediately that something is wrong. Something has gone _very_ wrong, and it has to do with Sam and Dean.

All Jack says is, “We need to go somewhere to talk.” And Cas knows his world is being ripped apart. Again.

*

Sitting in front of a fountain at the center of a pristine town, Cas learns that Dean is dead. Has died. Is already in heaven.

It’s too soon. _Far_ too soon. It hasn’t even been a human year since they defeated Chuck!

“Put him back,” Cas says, in a tone that’s not unlike the one he once took with the Empty. _Take me in his stead_.

Jack’s eyes are wide but not surprised. “Cas. I won’t do that.”

“He didn’t get to live his life.”

Jack blinks. “I know.”

“If you know, then you know this is deeply wrong, Jack. Unfair. You can make this right.”

“You know I promised not to do that, Cas. I promised not to interfere.”

Cas’s hands are in his lap, clasped. Shaking. “Some rules need to be broken, Jack. If you learned anything from me and Sam and Dean … it has to be that.”

Jack looks away, his eyes sad but his mood resolute. “I’m sorry, Castiel.”

“Don’t give me some line about how it’s meant to be.”

Jack’s confusion deepens. “Of course it wasn’t meant to be. Nothing is meant to be.” He looks down at his hands, shakes his head. “Dean made choices, Cas. He continued to hunt. He and Sam. They went out undermanned, without any backup. They continued to take risks.”

Cas closes his eyes. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. From _you_ , Jack. Of all people!”

“Cas, calm down—”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!”

“Cas—”

“He’s your _father_. Just as much as I’m your father, if not moreso. He was there when I wasn’t. When I couldn’t be. And yet here you sit, talking about him like—like he’s nothing to you, like he’s expendable—” Cas stands up despite feeling as though he might collapse.

“Cas, please just listen.” Jack stands too, extends a hand that Cas refuses to take.

“When you died, Jack. When you died, we moved heaven and earth to get you back. _Literally_.”

“I know, Cas, and I’m grateful—”

“If you were truly grateful we wouldn’t be having this conversation!”

Cas grimaces. His head is splitting. He knows he’s on the brink of saying some terrible things, but it’s like he’s in a barrel going over a waterfall and it’s too late to turn back.

“You’re not the son I fought for,” he says. “You’re not the same Jack the Winchesters fought for. I don’t know what’s happened to you—” Now it’s as though he’s not even saying these things—he’s standing outside himself, watching himself say them. “You’ve given up your humanity. You’ve become something else. This thing, this … failure. You couldn’t possibly be human and do this to Dean. Being in heaven—it hasn’t been good for you. How could you just—”

“Cas—”

“How could you abandon him like this? He needed you to be there, and you just didn’t show up, you looked away, you failed him—”

It isn’t until Jack throws his arms around him that Cas realizes he’s sobbing. The words he’s just laid on Jack echo in his head.

“Shh, Cas. Just sleep,” Jack says.

And with a touch to the forehead, he’s out.

*

When he wakes, it’s dark and quiet, and the only thing he knows for sure is that Jack is nearby.

He stirs. “Jack?”

“I’m here, Cas.”

“Am I back at the house?”

Jack pauses. “No. I brought you here. To a place that gets routine darkness. You needed it—sometimes even angels need what darkness has to offer.”

Cas lies back down. And feels deeply, deeply ashamed. His son is so good. Pure kindness. Precious to him.

“Jack. What I said to you—it was wrong. _Indecent_. And none of it was true.”

He can still hear those things he said, feel them in his head, and he knows that they weren’t really meant for Jack. _You’ve given up your humanity. You failed him_. “I was inflicting my feelings about myself on you. I’m so sorry.”

“I know Cas,” Jack says, setting a hand on Cas’s forehead. “I just wish you’d forgive yourself. You didn’t fail.”

He tries not to tear up. “I wish I’d recovered sooner. If I’d been there—”

“You just _weren’t_ Cas. And you still haven’t recovered. The Empty—it took a lot out of you. And my telling you about Dean certainly didn’t help matters any.”

He tilts his head to look at Jack. “Other angels who came back from the Empty are okay. Why am I not?”

Jack strokes his head. “Well, that’s not entirely true. Not everyone is okay. But if it’s taking you longer to recover, it’s because you absorbed the brunt of the Empty’s anger. As you helped others escape, it got angrier and angrier and had fewer beings on which to exact revenge. And—you know how the Empty worked. It confronted you with your sins, your guilt. It’s not surprising that it blew your own guilt out of proportion, weakening your essence. The Empty knew what makes us tick. It hit you where you live and breathe.”

A flicker of memory—the moment the Empty overplayed its hand. It confronted him with a leviathan. A _leviathan_. Leviathan didn’t go to the Empty! And that was when he had the proof to back up his suspicion that none of this was real—that Hannah wasn’t really driving a stake into his head every night, and Abner wasn’t really disemboweling Gadreel …

 _Listen to what this guy has to say_ , Crowley told the rest of their cellmates, who remained incredulous about Cas’s hunch. _I mean, he’s bonkers. Nice to look at but otherwise thick as a Jersey cow. But when it comes to detecting this kind of chicanery? The Winchesters’ third-wheel wing-buddy is a fucking savant._

“Cas, I have to apologize,” Jack says. “I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

In the dark, Cas can see only the outline of Jack’s face.

“I led you to believe I didn’t make contact with Sam and Dean after I left them that day. But I went back once. Very early on. So early that—well, I hadn’t even gotten you back from the Empty yet. I couldn’t even _find_ you.” He pauses. “They weren’t moving on, Cas. From you. Dean _really_ wasn’t moving on. He kept trying to bring you back.”

Jack pauses but keeps stroking his head, his other hand on Cas’s shoulder. “So I went to see them in a dream. And I couldn’t—I couldn’t bring them the news they wanted. I couldn’t tell them I had you back, that you were safe. But I felt I had to go to them … they’d been praying nonstop. I had to offer them some kind of closure.”

Jack clears his throat, his voice brimming with tears. “It was an awful thing to tell them—the saddest thing I’ve ever—”

Cas is still, clenching his fist to his chest.

“When we got you back from the Empty, it was touch-and-go at first. I didn't know if you were going to live. But when it was clear that you were going to survive, I should have gone to them right away to tell them you were fine. But it was chaos here, with so many angels—” He stops himself. “Well, that’s just an excuse, and not even a good one. I could have found the time. But—in any case, it seemed to me like they were moving on. They had a dog. Sam and Eileen were getting serious. And Dean—Dean was applying for jobs. He even went to therapy.”

“Dean went to … therapy?”

“I know, right? It didn’t feel like the right time to visit them again. It seemed like they were finding their own way. Without me. Without you. And I was still wanting to differentiate myself from Chuck as much as possible. No meddling.”

Cas struggles to take in all this information.

“That wasn’t the right thing, Cas. I should have told them you were back from the Empty. It was cruel not to.”

“But if they were moving on, Jack. If they were moving on …” _If they were moving on without me, then your instincts were correct_.

“They weren’t. Not really. Especially Dean. I believed he’d found some degree of peace, but—he was devastated when he lost you. And by _how_ he lost you. Haunted by your sacrifice. Cas—you always underestimated your effect on him. He loved you, too.”

Cas squeezes his eyes shut, trying to slow the inevitability of tears.

“I’m so sorry, Cas. I should have told you what was going on with them. And I should have gone to him just to tell him you were fine. I had this blinkered notion that … that eventually I could just send _you_ to him instead, so you could both—this is just so dumb when I look back on it.”

He takes a breath and just says it: “I just imagined this grand reunion between you two. The happiest of all surprises. The reunion you both deserved. Romantic, I guess? Well, it was so stupid of me. Stupid and sentimental.”

Cas understands. His son was trying to provide for him the opportunity that he’d never gotten up the courage to provide for himself. “It was human,” he manages to say. “Human, Jack.”

“Hubristic. In becoming God, forgot how many things can go wrong with people. How their lives are always in danger, if not from vampires then from boating accidents, or from an especially virulent strain of the flu. I forgot what you told me—that we have to appreciate every moment they’re alive, because they’re not alive for long.” Jack pauses in stroking Cas’s hair. “I suppose I can put Dean back on earth, Cas. If you feel it’s right. But—”

Cas looks up at him.

“He’s already here,” Jack continues. “He’s visited with Bobby, with his parents, with Jo and Ellen.”

Cas thinks of Mary, of her pain when she was resurrected, her disorientation. And of Sam and Dean’s inability to provide her with the peace she was yearning for, and their resulting confusion and hurt.

Back then, he told Mary that she belonged on earth. And he was certain of it at that time. But now he wouldn’t say the same thing. “To send him back now—it might be cruel.”

“We were kidding ourselves, thinking Dean would retire from hunting just because Chuck no longer had the reins. And if we send him back now—”

“He’d just go back to doing the same thing. He thinks he has to save the whole world.”

“Here at least he has the opportunity to find rest.”

Cas is crying again, but this time his tears have a degree of catharsis, not pure anguish. He reaches over to clutch Jack’s other hand, which is on his shoulder.

“What about Sam?” Cas says. He feels bad that thoughts of Sam are only just occurring to him.

He can feel Jack smile. “Sam will be fine. Just—trust me on that one. But I’m thinking about you. What do _you_ want right now? Do you want me to take you to him?”

Part of him wants nothing more than to see Dean, to welcome him into this place. But another part of him—the stubborn part of him—thinks it’s still too soon. And, well, he’s nervous. He thought he’d have more time to prepare for this day, to get himself in order. Now he’s not sure if he’ll ever be in order.

“I’ll let him get settled in first. Time to get adjusted.”

In the dark, Jack laughs quietly. “Okay, Castiel.”

“What?”

“Dean has many virtues. Patience is not among them.”

What is Jack implying?

“Yes, he wants to see you too, Cas. He wants to see you _a lot_. I’m going to visit him today, to welcome him officially. I’ll tell him you’re on your way.”

Cas squeezes Jack’s hand. “Thank you, Jack.”

“Do you want me to take you back to your friends now?”

His friends. Yes, he has angel friends. Who would have thought it? He can’t imagine telling Dean about his weird angel wannabe-human friends. “Yes,” he breathes, and just like that, he’s back.

*

Word of Dean Winchester’s death travels fast among the angels. It makes its way through Wing Town and the rehabilitation facilities and the groundskeeping entities and the Center of Actuarial Control. But by then it’s already been on angel radio.

Dean Winchester is dead.

Cas is devastated by Dean’s death—but now he’s also surprised. He’s surprised by other angels’ reaction to the news. _Stunned_. He wasn’t expecting his brethren to care so much, to drop what they’re doing to come to see him at the fratway house. To offer their condolences.

It’s spontaneous and unrehearsed. Real.

“I’m so sorry, Cas,” Balthazar says, wrapping his arms around him.

“He was a remarkable human,” Gadreel says. “He was like no one else. I count myself among the blessed to have been able to work with him. To get to know him.”

 _By hijacking his brother and killing our prophet_ , Cas thinks. The irony isn’t lost on Cas, but he just says, “Thank you, Gadreel. I know you helped him too. When I couldn’t.”

At some point he moves to the couch to sit down, but guests keep coming. This outpouring of sympathy is overwhelming, and part of him wishes he could be alone, but another part of him is grateful.

And he knows he has a duty to Dean—and to the other angels—to receive these messages.

“Which one was Dean again?” Rebecca asks.

“The one with the face,” Ambriel answers.

“ _Ohhh_.”

Hannah comes to him, and Cas is shocked to see that she’s crying. He just puts his arms around her. “I know how much he meant to you,” she whispers. “Because—” He knows what she wants to say. _Because you meant something to me_.

Some of his housemates seem to sense that he’s overwhelmed. They try to bring some levity to the proceedings. “In the human world, everyone brings casseroles at moments like this,” Anna says.

“It’s a ritual,” Benjamin says. “Which I never understood, because casseroles don’t cheer anyone up. They’re more than a little disgusting.”

Gabriel sits next to him on the couch, trying to take the edge off by making jokes. When Anna tells a funny story about her own run-in with Dean—not a story Cas finds funny or really wants to hear—Gabriel says, “And here I thought I was the biggest tart in the fratway house. Thanks for shattering the illusion, Anna!”

Anna just swats him.

The guests begin to peel off and soon he’s left with his housemates and closer friends. He looks down at his hands. His useless hands. “I should have been there. If only I’d been there—”

“Oh, just shut up.”

Everyone looks up. Metatron is sitting in the corner. He hasn’t said much until now.

Silence settles in the room.

Metatron gives a big, dramatic sigh. “Castiel. You are playing this _all wr_ ong. And it’s killing me. It’s killing me! It’s killing me to watch you take a page from _The Sorrows of Young Werther_ rather than, I don’t know, _Pride and Prejudice_. Or even fuckin’ _Bridget Jones’s Diary_. This is what I’m talking about when I say you have no sense of narrative. Or irony, situational or dramatic. You get more O. Henry endings than any being in existence, and it is _completely_ wasted on you.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Daniel says. He turns to Adina. “I don’t understand what he’s talking about.”

“Well, no, you wouldn’t either. All of you are just … I mean, can I say ‘philistines’? Or is that too harsh?” Metatron stands up, walks around, and sits on the coffee table so that he’s knee-to-knee with Cas. “Castiel, you love this man. You are _madly in love_ with this man. He is the McAdams to your Gosling. And fate or chance or circumstance or … whatever the fuck you want to call it … has dropped Mr. Cheekbones on your doorstep again … and all you do is cry a goddamn river about how you should have been there to save his ass. Again. Which you have already saved eighty times, and with no satisfying resolution to your arc.”

“Metatron—”

“I can’t take it anymore, Castiel. The pining you’ve been doing for years is more than a little annoying. It’s idiotic. And now that he’s dead? Well, why aren’t you with him right now? Or running toward him, arms outstretched in some beautiful field filled with flowers and birds and sunlight? Where is your sweeping orchestral _Dr. Zhivago_ soundtrack?”

“This isn’t a movie, Metatron,” Anna says, her voice clipped.

“No shit! It’s heaven, Anna dear. Which is like a movie but with better lighting.”

“I wanted Dean to really live his life,” Cas says, the sadness seeping out of his voice. Again. “A human life, with all its imperfections.” _I wanted Dean to get married and have children_ , he wants to say, but he can’t form the words. He’s pained by everything Dean has lost: a real job. A normal home. Backyard barbecues. The opportunity to take vacations. To quit drinking, and fall off the wagon, and then quit again. To go gray. To take out a life insurance policy. To get arthritis and blame it on the hunting misadventures of his youth.

Metatron looks at the ceiling. “Oh my God, Castiel … screw Paris.” He shakes his head. “Seriously, if you go to Dean Winchester and start whining to him about all that growing-old shit he didn’t get to do? That’s what he’s going to say to you. ‘Screw Paris.’”

“What does Paris have to do with anything?” Adina says.

Metatron sighs again, his entire body a pantomime version of extreme exasperation. “Are you shitting me? _Love Story_? 1970? Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal?”

Everyone looks at him blankly. Then Cas remembers something. “Oh, that’s right. She dies in the end.”

“Gee, thanks for the spoiler alert, Cas,” Gabriel says.

“Metatron has ruined the ending of every movie for me, I’m afraid.”

“She actually dies in the beginning,” Metatron says. “But that’s beside the point.” He holds out his hands, a fruitless gesture. “We always think that humans should get more time. _They_ always think they should get more time. They never do all the things in their lives that we want for them, or that they want for them. Hell, my vessel had barely been outside of Paramus, New Jersey. But at the end of the day, they get what they get, which is almost always a shit deal, and they make the best of it.”

“He might have a point,” Samandriel says. “Even a broken clock is right once a day.”

“Twice,” Anna whispers.

“What?”

“Twice a day. Human clocks—never mind.”

“Perhaps we should all watch this movie, this _Love Story_ ,” Gadreel says. “That way, we can better understand the situational context in which Castiel finds himself, and properly advise him on what to do next.”

“Is it like _The Fault in Our Stars_?” Abner says. “I loved that.”

“Oh, I know,” Samandriel says. “So sad.”

“I don’t think Castiel should be watching anything right now,” Metatron says. “I think he needs to wing his thick-as-a-brick ass down to Winchester’s part of heaven and see what happens next. And then.” He clears his throat. “ _Then_ he can come back and tell us all about it, spoiler alerts or not. Me especially. As a token of gratitude. And I’ll get to write a book about it.”

“O _kay_ ,” Gabriel says, cutting Metatron off. He tucks an arm inside Cas’s and guides him to his feet. A protective gesture. “I think this has all been quite enough for one day.”

He walks Cas into the other room. “You look exhausted,” he says. “You want me to wing you upstairs?”

“I’m fine, Gabriel.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“No.” He looks toward the door.

Gabriel smiles mildly. “It’ll be okay, Cas.”

 _Will it?_ He wonders. “Metatron is right in that I _should_ go see Dean. He’s here. We were friends.”

“And yet you don’t seem to be excited about the prospect. You’re stalling.”

Again, Cas’s gaze slides to the door. “My last moments on earth with Dean were so fraught.” That’s the only way he can describe them. He doesn’t want to go into details.

“Well, so what?” Gabriel gives his upper arm an affectionate squeeze. “That’s nothing you can change now. So it doesn’t matter.”

“You really believe that?”

“Sure. And Metatron is wrong, by the way. You don’t need flowers or an orchestra. Just go to the dude. He’s a chill dude. But … you want me to wing you down there? I’ve recovered enough to do that, and it’ll save you time. You see my wings—almost back to full span, eh? I promise nothing'll go wrong.”

“Thank you, but I’m fine. I’ll take the elevators.” Elevators will give him some time to work out what he needs to say.

Daniel sticks his head out of the living room. “We’ve got _Love Story_ all cued up and ready to go. You in?”

“Sure,” Gabriel says. “In a minute.”

Once Daniel disappears, Gabriel turns back to Cas. “They’re weird. They are so fuckin’ weird. Makes you miss the days when we just played harps and smote dragons.”

Cas smiles in acknowledgment.

“Castiel, it’ll be okay. And then you’ll come back and tell us about it. Or—whatever you feel like telling.” He opens the door for him. “But not too soon. Seriously. Don’t hurry back on our account.”

Cas hopes that won’t be a problem.


	6. Chapter 6

When Dean drives Baby back into town, he’s a bit flummoxed. This is the clearly the same small city he saw when he arrived in heaven—where he had his unfortunate run-in with Jimmy Novak and was told he was tanking the neighborhood—but now it seems to have developed into a much larger metropolitan area. The park has more than quadrupled in size; its people sprawl out on blankets, play frisbee in the grass with their dogs. The center of the city stretches for miles in all directions, buildings and streets and sidewalks and trees.

At the center of everything is a stately neoclassical-looking white building with steps and Doric columns. Its plaque reads _Heaven Historical Society_. A plain enough declaration.

Miraculously, parking doesn’t seem to be a problem. There’s a garage with spaces and spaces and spaces. The conveniences of modern heaven.

Dean parks and gets out and starts up the flight of steps. He feels a bit like Rocky, climbing all these steps, but at least he doesn’t get winded. (He assumes it’s not possible to get winded in heaven.)

So this is the research library his father was talking about.

When he gets inside, it’s clear that it’s even vaster than it appeared—that it may continue inward and onward for several miles, rooms upon rooms of books and manuscripts. But right in front of him is a huge reading room—wooden tables furnished with gentle lighting. A few people are there, some bent over old books or manuscripts, a couple others clustered together.

“Can I help you?” someone asks. A male voice.

He turns to see a young blond kid, a teenager, behind a desk. “I’m just looking,” he says.

He smiles. “Feel free. There are computers in the corners. Old fashioned card catalogs against that wall over there.”

Dean wanders from shelf to shelf for about fifteen minutes. He takes a shot at the computers. He doesn’t turn up much about Cas. In one reference book, he sees his name in the index. He turns to the page and reads _Castiel. Angel, b. after creation. Assignments: From Humanity to the Fall: 45 th garrison. From the Fall to Exodus: 107th garrison (see also: _Egyptian captivity – Plagues _and_ Passover offensives.) _From Exodus to Babylonian Exile: 334 th garrison_.

And it just goes on like that, giving a dumb list of all Cas’s garrisons and the bullshit campaigns they undertook. “This is bullshit,” he says out loud.

He hates to ask librarians for help—hates when other people know what he’s looking for—but he goes to the kid at the desk and decides to ask him where he can find more information about angels.

“We have three floors of this building just about angels,” the kid says, with a little too much gusto for Dean’s liking. “And another four annexes. Anything you’re looking for?”

“Just … general info. Maybe on activities undertaken by individual angels?” It sounds so dumb when he says it like that. _Yes, I’m stalking a particular angel._

“Oh,” he says, pulling up his chair and getting a piece of paper out from behind the desk. “ _The Angel Almanac_ is the best thing for that, and it’s updated frequently, events permitting. It’s in the L Block.” He points to an area on the piece of paper. Dean can tell it’s a map of the building. If you can call the building a building.

“And I can just go there and look up anyone? I mean, anything?”

“Sure. But the most recent volumes are only in Enochian.”

“What?”

“About four hundred years’ worth, give or take a century. It takes a while for us to get around to providing translations.”

“Fantastic.” He folds the map in half. An unforeseen complication. Enochian reading ability required. “Just my luck.”

“Enochian isn’t your favorite?” the kid says, giving him a wry look, like he understands.

“Oh yeah, I loved going to that class. Right up there with spelling and home-ec.”

“I know, it bites it. But actually …” He produces another flier. “We really do have Enochian classes here. You can come either Mondays and Wednesdays or Tuesdays and Thursdays. Daniel teaches Mondays and Wednesdays, and Adina teaches Tuesdays and Thursdays.” He lowers his voice. “Between you and me, people like Daniel more, but Adina’s the better teacher.”

Ugh. Enochian classes. Maybe this _is_ hell. “Great,” Dean says, rolling up the flier to stick it in his back pocket. He’ll chuck it later.

“As horrible as it sounds, it’s a good thing to know,” the kid says. “And you know, it’s actually not that hard? I guess it’s a lot easier to pick up languages when you’re dead. At least that’s what the old people tell me. I guess you can learn in an hour what would take like a year on earth. And Enochian is essential to being able to travel widely in heaven. They say it’s our … lingua franca?”

“Our what?”

The boy stands, as if sensing he can better explain things if he’s upright. “So you can talk to anyone? Say you want to get outside this part of heaven, talk to a ninth-century Mayan. You can’t do that with English. But if enough people speak Enochian …”

“Then we can all communicate. Gotcha.” Dean doesn’t know if he really wants to communicate all that much with ancient Sumerians. Or twelfth-century Vikings. (Actually … twelfth-century Vikings might be cool.)

The kid leans forward. “And on the down-low? It pisses off the angels when they can’t talk shit about us anymore. That’s what Daniel and Adina told me.”

“Who the hell are Daniel and Adina?”

“Two OG Angels. But don’t worry, they’re cool.”

He doesn’t remember hearing about them before. He wonders if they know Cas. He takes the flier out of his pocket and looks at it again. It’s translated into at least thirty human languages. Nuts.

“I—I didn’t want to say anything before because I thought it might be kinda awkward?”

Deans looks up to find the kid staring at him.

“But now I’m like, oh well. I know you’re Dean Winchester. You died saving my life. Thank you.” He holds out his hand.

Dean takes it. “Who—”

“I’m Brady. Your last mission. Me and my brother were taken by—”

“Vampires, right.” Dean shakes his hand slowly, trying to organize his thoughts. He has too many thoughts. “How are you even—if I saved you, then—”

“Medulloblastoma. Cancer, basically. My parents had already taken me for testing before …. Well, right after you saved us, I got the diagnosis. I lived for another seven months.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry,” Dean says, releasing the boy’s hand.

“Why? You gave me seven more months with my family, and my brother’s still alive. And now I get to be with my dad.”

Dean’s befuddled—not least of all by the fact that this kid died _after_ he did and is somehow already here, and thriving, while Dean’s wandering around like a dickshit chump with a hangover. And also— “How are you so big? When we rescued you, you were, like, nine.”

“In heaven you pick the age you want to be. Most people pick when they were happiest, which I guess is usually around forty? But I didn’t want to be that old. And I knew I didn’t want to be a kid anymore, either. So I decided to be the age I would be if I went to college.” He pauses. “I guess in the end? I was just hoping to get to be that old.”

Dean remembers when Sam went to college, tries to ignore the pang. Then he thinks about teaching Jack to drive and do other teenagery things, and how much it meant to him.

“Charlie says hi, by the way. She said you’d be here at some point or another. Nerds of a feather, she said.”

“Charlie _Bradbury_?”

“She comes here most afternoons to sift through the archives. She’s one of the scholars.” He motions to the spacious reading room. “Here you can find the answers to all the questions you’ve thought about your whole life. What is the meaning of it all, why are ears shaped like that, is love at first sight really real. And other things. Or not. A lot of people still like to argue about things, so if you’re into that …”

Dean turns back around. “Is that stuff also in Enochian?”

The kid nods sheepishly. “Not everything, but …”

“Yeah.” Dean looks around, taking it all in. “I got it.”

*

Outside the library, he feels something vibrating in his pocket. He fishes out a cellphone. Where the hell did that come from? Heaven has cellphones? Since when? And how has he just gotten a text message?

_Dean, it’s dad. Have tackle, planning on taking a boat out on the lake. Thought you might want to come. No pressure._

No pressure? Who is this person and what has he done with his father? Maybe heaven has a mellowing effect on all the Winchesters—except Dean. What the crap.

He feels ambivalent about going. He doesn’t know if he wants to be in the middle of a lake with his dad—not after their weird conversation earlier in the day (plus whatever details Dad picked up from eavesdropping on the conversation with Mom—how in God’s name is he expected to sit in a boat with his dad just hours after he overheard him crying to Mom about having kissed his not-quite “partner”? Will they talk about it at all, or will it just hang in the air, like an unacknowledged fart?)—but almost immediately, he gets another text message.

 _Dean, it’s dad. Jack dropped by. Thought you might like to know_.

*

He barely registers his trip back to his parents’ house. _Jack. It’s Jack_. It’s like he didn’t drive there, even though he knows he did—he has Baby behind him to prove it.

When he gets to the house, Jack is standing on the porch, talking to his parents. He turns to see Dean, smiles and holds up his hand in that dorky wave. Then he holds both arms outstretched. Dean nearly knocks him over.

*

After the greetings and laughter and a few embarrassing tears of joy, Dean and Jack sit side by side on the wooden steps to the front porch of his parents’ house. John and Mary have retreated inside, leaving Jack and Dean to get caught up. On everything.

“Wow, kid, you sure know how to make an entrance,” Dean says.

Jack looks like the same teenager he was when Dean knew him, with his down-to-earth clothes and shoes. But here he’s also happier. Lighter. Like nothing is weighing him down. On earth, he was sad. Even when he was trying not to be. No matter how he smiled, he couldn’t conceal it—that same deep sadness that Dean remembers seeing in Sammy’s face, when Sam was just that age. The sadness that came from losing a mother. And having a fucked-up father.

Or fathers, in Jack’s case.

Dean had never been able to shake that sadness from either of them. _Because I was partly to blame for it_.

“I’ve been here for weeks,” Dean continues. “I thought you’d never show. I thought you were part of the sand and the stones or something and that I’d never see you again. Christ, Jack. That really sucked.”

Jack doesn’t stop smiling, but he also looks confused. “Dean. You’ve been here for hours. A day and a half, tops.”

“I’ve been driving around for weeks! A month, at least.”

Jack continues to stare at him. “I don’t know what to tell you, Dean. It really hasn’t been that long. Definitely not a month. But time in heaven, it moves—”

“Different. Yeah, I’ve heard.” He leans against the wooden porch beam beside him. “I thought that meant it would move faster. Not slower. The expression is ‘time flies when you’re having fun,’ Jack. Not the opposite. Time moves slow in hell, not heaven. So there’s one for the suggestions box. As you keep improving this place.”

“I don’t decide how time in heaven moves, Dean.”

“You don’t?”

“No. _You_ decide how time in heaven moves. Or how you want to perceive time.”

“Huh? I sure as shit didn’t want to be driving around in what looked like the bumfuck American Midwest and Pacific Northwest for days on end. Trust me. That wasn’t my idea of a good time.”

Jack holds out his hands. Shrugs.

“And I just saw a kid in town who—who died after me. Of cancer. And he beat me here. How does that happen?”

Jack is quiet for a long time. Thinking. Then he looks at Dean. “I don’t know if I have an answer, Dean. I mean—when we redid this place, and I asked people what they wanted, they said they wanted choices on what to do in the afterlife. So I decided to try making heaven a place where humanity could just be. To explore. To have second chances. It could be that … I don’t know. You died very suddenly. You died at a young age. Maybe you weren’t quite ready to see me?”

“I’m not _that_ young.” Again, he thinks of the kid in the historical society.

“Maybe you just needed some alone time. And to see your parents and Bobby first. Maybe you chose to take the time, without consciously registering your decision. To have space.”

He thought about his long afternoons on the road. Listening to music. Praying at the altar of the Gas-n-Sip. It seems absolutely idiotic that he would have chosen such a thing, but also strangely fitting. Sam’s the sort of person who could roll into heaven and see everyone he ever knew within the first hour. But Dean, evidently, has baggage. Still. What else is new.

“So I was in the veil?” he says.

“Oh no,” Jack says. “You definitely weren’t in the veil. I wouldn’t have left you in the veil. Or anywhere else. If you’d been anywhere besides heaven … I would have launched an all-out offensive, Dean.”

He feels terrible. A minute ago he was blasting Jack for taking him on this overlong tedious magical carpet-ride. Again, the son he never deserved.

“This place is incredible, Jack,” he says. He thinks about making some crack about bringing down the properly values. _My soul’s currency isn’t high enough to pay the rent here. You sure I won’t get tossed out?_

Jack casts him a sideways glance. “I wish you’d stop thinking it’s too good for you.”

Dean presses his hands together.

“You’re my father.”

Dean can’t look at Jack. He shields his face with his left hand. “Lucky for us, you had two other fathers.”

“Stop. Just stop. Between you and Cas, I just—” He studies Dean’s face. “Cas is fine. I know that’s what you’ve been wanting to ask me since you first saw me but couldn’t bring yourself to, because you were scared of the answer.”

Dean swallows. “Cas is okay?”

“Yes. He’s back from the Empty, and he’s safe.”

Dean feels relief, but also a fresh peal of anxiety: If Cas is okay, then why hasn’t he shown himself? Why isn’t he with Jack?

“He wanted to be here right now, and he’s coming to see you shortly,” Jack explains. (Either he can read Dean’s mind, Dean thinks, or Dean’s thought-patterns are just super predictable. Probably the second thing.) “He’ll be here soon, but—”

“But what?”

Dean entertains a number of scenarios: _But he’s not the same Cas._ Or: _But he doesn’t love you anymore—not like that_. Or: _But he’s busy with other things because he’s moved on_.

“Cas loves you, Dean. In ways that I’m not sure even he …. Well, let’s just say news of your death was very distressing to him. He’s taking it hard.”

Dean presses his palms together even harder. “Is that why he—I mean, I prayed to him constantly. Is that why he never answered? Because he didn’t want me to be dead?”

A flicker of consternation crosses Jack’s face, followed by a moment of realization. “Oh. _Oh_. No, he wouldn’t have heard you, Dean. Not in his current state.”

“His current state?”

“He’s still weak from his time in the Empty. Getting stronger—he’s okay. I mean, he _will_ be okay. But he wasn’t deliberately ignoring you or anything. He’s healing himself, and I’m healing him … but he’s not at full power.”

“Oh.” Questions collide in his head. _What happened to him? How bad was it? Does he remember anything? How long was he there? How long will he take to get better? What can I do?_ He doesn’t know which to ask first.

“The Empty was the worst enemy Cas has ever faced … and you know his record. Angels aren’t physical beings—they’re energy. Pure energy. And the Empty works by psychically assaulting beings made of energy, converting them to nothing.” Jack pauses. “Or I should say, it _worked_ that way. It doesn’t exist anymore. But when it did, it broke the spirits of angels and demons so they would give up and submit to its power, sleeping forever while they did so. And it did that by using a lot of … coercion tactics.”

“You mean torture.”

Jack looks down.

Dean wraps his arm around the porch beam. Shakes his head. “How long?”

“I’m not sure. I can tell you how much time passed here, but it’s relative, of course. He doesn’t talk about it. I don’t think he finds it very interesting or worth going into.”

Dean doesn’t say anything. He knows that feeling.

“And he won’t tell you this, but he’s the one who ended the Empty. He did that by getting everyone out. He didn’t just claw his way back here, to me. He got everyone else out as well. The other angels. It’s part of what’s allowed heaven to grow this wide and deep. Angel energy helps power heaven.”

Dean looks around. So that’s what Bobby meant when he said _Cas helped_. A bit of Bobby Singer understatement.

“Just know that he might open up to you about it, or he might not. In either case.”

 _In either case, be careful with him_ , Dean thinks.

Dean doesn’t know what to say. He’s both grateful to Cas and insanely pissed at him for making such a shit deal. Heartbroken that Cas suffered. Angry with himself for not being able to save Cas, and for allowing their friendship to get to the point where the Empty could weaponize it. Furious with Chuck for the entirety of the whole fucking thing. _Just give me something to kill_ , he thinks. He wants to tell Jack that the Empty should be glad it’s dead and that Dean Winchester is too, because if not, he’d resurrect its stupid ass just to torture it for a few years till it begged to be put down again.

These are just some of the thoughts he’s got moving through his head.

He watches as a small russet leaf falls from the tree above and lands near his shoe. He clears his throat and looks at Jack. “How do you say, ‘I’m proud of you’ in Enochian?”

*

Back when he was alive, Dean imagined what he’d say to Cas when Cas returned. At first, he really thought Cas would return—that he’d wake up in the morning and dude would just be there, at the foot of his bed, and he’d say, _Jesus, Cas. The fact that you were dead doesn’t make it any less creepy._ Or Cas would call him on his cellphone, and to make sure it wasn’t someone else, someone like Lucifer, he’d say, _Tell me something only we know_. And he’d wait for a word, for an answer, that would break him open again.

He thought that he’d tease Cas, that he’d mock him for his dying confession. That was the only way they’d ever move past it, Dean thought. He’d be vulgar and crass, like always, desperate to cover up how much Cas’s confession meant to him, shook him to his core. Desperate not to have to be vulnerable in the face of Cas’s shattering, perfect sincerity. _Really? You thought you couldn’t have me? You could have just asked, you dumb bastard. I don’t play hard to get._ Or: _Well, I usually don’t put out until the second or third date. But for you, I would have made an exception. As long as you smelled okay, we could have had oral._

Dean was a pessimist. Maybe just a realist. Flip a coin. He didn’t believe in resurrection, even though he himself had experienced it. He didn’t think anyone could be saved, except for the people he had saved. When Cas had died a few years ago, the day that Jack was born, Dean had burned his body.

He didn’t believe anyone could love him, until he found out someone did, someone who was murdered for it, right in front of him. For him.

For all the ways life had been cruel to him, it had also been kind. He didn’t understand quite how kind until after Cas was dead, and then dead, and nothing could bring him back. How to accept everything was over? It hadn’t even begun. He left his door unlocked every night, even though locks rarely posed a challenge to Cas to begin with. He prayed. The nights grew longer, and then they grew shorter. But in the bunker, underground, time remained the same. And Cas never came back.

In loamy late-winter evenings—that part of the year when everything is damp and brown but not so dark—Dean would take the dog to walk around the pond, and what he thought about saying to Cas would eventually change. The words he chose would become less self-protective, less edgy, less insouciant. Until they were simply: _I love you, too._ And then just: _I love you_. _I love you. I love you._

 _Please, just be okay_.

*

Dean offers to let Jack drive Baby to the spot where Cas is going to be, but Jack declines, “I’m taking your dad fishing,” he says. “Or he’s taking me? Well, whatever. I’m busy, Dean.”

So Dean sets out on his own. But now distance is no issue. Neither is time. Dean’s barely on the road when he finds himself there, at a park bordered on one side by a river. He sees Cas’s small, familiar form on a bench under a tree with branches that reach so high they seem to blend with the sky.

All at once he’s relieved to the point of real tears to see Cas there, looking fine, if just a bit different—instead of the suit and trenchcoat, he’s wearing jeans and button-down shirt. He’s sitting forward, his elbows balanced on his knees.

 _You’re okay_ , Dean thinks. _Thank God you’re okay._

As if Cas hears him— _maybe his angel radio works in closer proximity?_ —he turns to see Dean. They lock eyes through the windshield.

Dean wants to look away for a second, just to wipe his eyes, which are filling with tears faster than he can blink them away, but he can’t. He just gets out of his car. And then Cas is standing to meet him, and the distance between them is closing—again, it’s like distance has no sway in this place—and Cas is smiling but also crying, not unlike the last time Dean saw him, and then they’re together, and there are no more challenges to overcome and nothing between them. It’s just a crush of limbs and the scent of tears and the sensation Cas’s face against his, that same stubble. Dean is surprised by how familiar he feels. How physical. He kisses Cas’s cheek, at first. And then his neck. And cries into his shoulder.

Who knows how long they stay like that.

Eventually they move over to the bench, arms still entangled. Dean pulls Cas closer. Nothing he wants to say seems adequate. Then again, maybe it doesn’t have to be. “I didn’t quite know what I was supposed to be looking for,” he says.

Cas’s gaze slides in his direction, even though they’re so close that it’s unnecessary.

“I mean, what you’d look like. I thought maybe I was looking for someone the size of the Chrysler Building.”

“Oh.” Cas laughs. (It’s so good to hear him laugh.) “Well, my true form is still overwhelming, so when I'm with humans, in this part of heaven, you see me as you remember me, and also as I want to be seen. We sort of meet in the middle.”

“No kidding.” He squeezes Cas’s shoulder. “Where are we, exactly?”

“Just a park.” He pauses. “But there’s a degree of cover here, from other people and angels. It’s more …”

“Private?”

“Secluded.”

“So you won’t mind if I …” He touches Cas’s face, tilts his chin upward and kisses him. Just briefly, gently, but better than that day in the bunker.

When he pulls away, Cas’s eyes are still closed. Then he opens them slowly, as if being pulled from sleep.

“I—I’m sorry,” Dean says, overcome with a sense of momentary self-consciousness. He suddenly worries that he was too forward. He still doesn’t know what Cas has been through. “I should have asked first.”

“No, Dean. You never have to ask.”

“Sure I do.”

“You’re the one giving, not taking.”

He takes Cas’s hand in his and presses it against his chest. “That’s just not true. This thing between you and me? You give. You give a lot. And to everyone else? You’ve given everything. Your entire existence has been spent in service to others.” He thinks of that ridiculous list in the book in the library, of battles and garrisons. Talk about selflessness. Dude’s never had a day off. “And now? If I can just be here for you? With you?” He shrugs. “I’m lucky.”

Cas looks down, stricken. “Dean, you shouldn’t be here. I’m sorry—”

Dean tilts Cas’s chin upward again. “No. None of that. I’m _lucky_ , Cas. Technically I should be in hell. A few times over. Or dead months ago, via Billie.” He lets go of Cas’s chin. “You gave me more time with Sam, which was more than I ever thought possible. And now you’ve …” He gestures to the space around them. “You’ve gone and done this. When is it gonna be enough, Cas?”

He leans back on the bench, spreading out a little, hoping Cas follows his lead enough to relax.

He does, leaning back as well. “Jack did most of the concept. He’s very devoted to making this place what it always should have been, and he loves details.”

“And you provided the juice.” He clears his throat. “Jack filled me in on a few things. Says you don’t like to talk about it. Cool beans. But if you ever want to? Also cool. I’m here. All day, every day. Don't have anywhere else to be.” He can’t help but smile a little bit. “Guess my boyfriend is a big hero.”

That gets Cas’s attention. He raises his eyebrows.

And that’s when Dean decides to say it— “I’m proud of you.” In Enochian.

Cas looks at him for a beat, and then just laughs.

“What? Did I say it wrong?”

“It depends on what you were trying to say. You just said, ‘I’m a seagull.’”

“Dammit.”

“Jack’s Enochian is often a little awkward when it comes to the specific inflections. He functions in it pretty well, but he didn’t grow up speaking it.”

“Really? Being God doesn’t automatically upload heaven’s first language into your brain?”

“Apparently not. But he’ll get there.”

Dean pulls the flier from his back pocket. “And I’m gonna have to take these classes, I guess. You know these two? Daniel and Adina?”

Cas takes the flier. “I live with them. In a house. But you don’t have to take classes. I’ll teach you.”

“You live with them in a house?”

“Not just them. A couple other angels, too. Some you know, some you don’t. We call it a frat house.” Cas summarizes it briefly for Dean, tells him they practice doing nothing by playing pool and watching Netflix. “But Daniel and Adina are transitioning out. They have jobs. I think they really want to be down here in this part of heaven. Among humans.”

Dean rubs his hand along Cas’s shoulders. Slides his thumb to the back of his neck. “What about you?”

Cas barely hesitates, leaning forward again to press his lips against Dean’s. And they’re kissing again, but this time more slowly. More involved.

Eventually Cas pulls back and then puts his arms around Dean, holding him close. “There is a lot to tell you about, Dean. But I don’t know where to begin. I don’t even know what I know.”

Dean just says “okay,” and lets Cas take him by the hand and guide him from the bench. He knows that he’d been right, all those months ago, not to accept that everything was over. It hadn’t even begun.


	7. Chapter 7

Cas is thankful that Jack has set up this secluded part of heaven for him and Dean—not because he cares what anyone else thinks of them—an angel and a human together—but because he knows that the angels are just damn _interested_ in this thing he has with Dean. Curious for curiosity’s sake, in the way that angels often are. He knows his housemates will be happy for him, but that they’ll also be artlessly inquisitive about this love thing. He imagines them together, comparing notes, highlighting the similarities between his narrative and that of _The Notebook_ or _The Fault in Our Stars_ or _Call Me by Your Name_ or whatever dreary movie they’ve seen most recently.

And he’s also glad for the privacy because, well, after talking a bit and kissing a lot, and making their way to a small house that sits on the edge of a lush forest, Dean pulls away Cas’s clothes, and they’re intimate for the first time.

“Intimate” is how he puts it to Dean. They’re kissing each other, and Cas is against the wall, and they’re kissing some more, and Dean unbuttons Cas’s shirt and slides it off, and then takes off his own shirt, and presses them together at the waist, and Cas pulls his lips away for a moment to say, “Are we—are we going to be intimate? I mean, sexually.”

Dean steps a few inches back and, propping one hand on the wall above Cas’s head, laughs. His whole body shakes. “Cas, I’m sorry,” he says, smiling so hard that it’s contagious. “I don’t know if it’s the things you say or the way you say them, but you never stop making me laugh.”

“I’m glad, Dean.”

“Don’t ever change.”

“I won’t.”

Dean wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, and Cas can tell that the laughter was something he needed. To take the edge off. _He’s nervous_ , Cas thinks. They’re both nervous.

“Good. Yeah, we can be intimate, Cas.” He reaches for Cas’s left hand with his right hand and weaves his fingers through Cas’s. “Sexually. If it’s something you want.”

Being with Dean—in every way possible—is what he wants, and what he’s wanted for a while, but he’s also a little overwhelmed. Worried he won’t know how to do what he’s just proposed. Or that he won’t be any good at it. “Dean, I want to be with you. I’m just—”

Dean moves forward to peer into Cas’s eyes. “We can slow down. No pressure, Cas. Whatever you feel like doing.”

“No, I just—” He definitely doesn’t want to slow down. “I want to. But I’m—” He clears his throat. “I’m unpracticed. I don’t have a lot of, you know, knowledge. Experience.” 

Dean’s expression changes from searching to concerned. Like he understands something for the first time.

“I’ve only slept with one person, and she stabbed me.”

Dean’s gaze doesn’t waver. “She didn’t just stab you, Cas. She killed you. You were gone. I mean, dead and gone. And she didn’t bring you back, Gadreel did.” He pauses. “Sorry I didn’t tell you that at the time. It just wasn’t a good time. And then, afterwards—"

“It’s okay.”

“Reapers, man. They’re brutal. But don’t dwell on that. That’s past stuff. I don’t care, Cas.” He shakes his head slightly. “And besides, I don’t have—I mean, this is new to me, too.”

Cas squeezes Dean’s hand. “You mean, with a man.”

Dean stiffens a little, looks down. Cas regrets bringing it up—reminding Dean of the obvious wrinkle in the course of events, the twist that’s always been there. Human relationship dynamics aren’t intuitive to him, but he knows enough to understand that Dean’s identity has always been wedded to intense ideas about masculinity.

He didn’t want to broadside Dean with that—especially not now. Their being together has already been a fraught and tortuous journey.

But Dean seems okay to breeze past it. “Yeah, you know me, man. I mean, I’ve thought about … things … but I spent a lot of my life …” He looks up again, at Cas, and some expression of guilt and longing crosses his face. Then he seems to brighten again. “Well, like I said. What’s past is past.”

And again, Cas feels terrible that Dean’s life was cut so short.

“I’ve also never had sex on this side of existence, Cas. Or with a celestial being. So there you go, a whole slew of firsts for both of us. We’ll just take it as it goes. We will figure it out. Like we always do. And then we’ll have champagne afterwards.”

Cas squints. “That second thing isn’t quite accurate. You slept with Anna.”

He can’t believe he just said that—right at this moment.

But luckily Dean takes it with the kind of stride that eluded him in life. He doubles over, shaking with laughter. “You keep better track of my hookups than I do. Oh, Cas.”

“I didn’t—I mean, I don’t. She … reminded me, actually. She also lives in the house with me.”

Dean laughs again, this time pulling Cas toward him and clasping him in a tight embrace. “Cas, I’m laughing so hard I’m _crying_. You weren’t joking about living in a frat house, huh. Bunch of angels sitting around talking about all the people they banged. Bring me to your next kegger and we’ll call it even.”

Dean doesn’t wait for a response, just starts kissing him again. Cas’s legs feel numb due to some combination of nervousness and desire. And Dean, he knows, is feeling the same thing. He’s eager and gentle but also skittish. _This matters to him_ , Cas thinks, and it’s deeply affecting to know this, but it also engenders in him a kind of protectiveness. He wants to assure Dean that he loves him unconditionally—that there’s nothing Dean could possibly do that would upset him or change the way he feels or make him not okay.

They’re both a mess, Cas realizes—traumatized from losing each other, again and again and again. When Dean said, _I lied when I said I could lose you again_ , he was telling the truth in more ways than one. He was speaking for them both.

He wishes he could show Dean that he’s not the person he thinks he is—a person who hurts others.

He pushes back hard against Dean, pulling them together at the waist as Dean had done. Then he hooks one finger to the front of Dean’s jeans, and starts to undo the button. Reaches inside.

Dean gasps into his mouth. Twitches away, out of reflex, but then surges forward again. And after a few moments of that, he reaches between them and steadies Cas’s hand. “We really should lie down.”

In the bedroom, Dean helps Cas out of his pants and then takes his off as well. They don’t bother to get under the covers. Initially they lie next to each other, Cas on his back and Dean on his side, his hands touching his abdomen. Cas flinches a bit. “You’re ticklish,” Dean says. “I didn’t know angels could be ticklish. Here.” Dean takes Cas’s hand and puts it on his abdomen, and then puts his hand on top of Cas’s. “That always helps.” Then he kisses Cas’s neck, his collarbone.

Cas reaches over to pull Dean closer to him, so that their bodies are touching almost completely.

Dean props himself up on one elbow. “If anything isn’t what you want, or doesn’t feel good, you have to tell me.”

Cas can’t imagine anything that Dean could do that wouldn’t feel good. “Dean,” he starts to say.

“ _Promise_ me,” Dean says, squeezing the hand he’s holding to Cas’s abdomen and pulling him even closer.

“I promise,” Cas says.

What they do together doesn’t take very long, and it isn’t very complicated, but it feels good nonetheless. It’s just Dean’s lips pressed to his, Dean’s hand between them, touching him. Dean’s weight against him. On top of him. He arches upward, pushing himself against Dean.

At some point, Dean takes his hand away, catches Cas’s hand and holds it over his head. They continue to move together.

“Cas,” Dean breathes. “Open your eyes.”

Cas does so to find Dean’s green eyes staring into his. They stay like that for several long moments, moving slowly together. Then Dean breaks their gaze, speeds up, thrusting harder against him, his lips catching Cas’s, savoring his lower lip. He moves hand again so that it’s between them, grasping. Holding him in the right way. Breathing hard, Cas comes. Dean follows a few seconds later, and Cas holds him as he finishes, cinching both arms around him, relishing the sensation of Dean's warm breath on his neck. And Dean is kissing him again, fiercely. Then he kisses Cas lightly, his lips just grazing his cheek, his jawline. He eases off, laying his head against Cas’s chest, and Cas just holds him, weaving his fingers through Dean’s hair.

He’s not surprised that Dean is emotional, that he’s crying. He knows how deeply Dean feels things. “I love you so much, Dean,” he says quietly, once he's caught his breath enough to speak.

Dean sniffles, raises his head a little bit to look at Cas. “I love you too so much, Cas.” His voice breaks. “Oh, Cas. I’m just—I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t say that when I was alive. I’m sorry that I didn’t make you feel … wanted.”

Cas strokes his shoulder gently. “I knew.”

“No, you didn’t. Not like I—I mean, I made you miserable, Cas. I was so sad to hear …” His breath catches. “Sad to hear you weren’t, you know, happy.” The admission breaks him open a little more. Two seconds away from sobbing. “I have that effect on people, you know. Or, I should say, _had_.”

Cas holds him a little tighter, closes his eyes. He almost wants to laugh at the idea that Dean could have made him unhappy. As if Cas had been happy _before_ he met Dean, and unhappy afterwards. Like Dean ruined him.

Then he wants to cry, knowing that Dean spent his last months on earth thinking about those words. Believing he’d been this paradox: the root cause of both Cas’s unhappiness and his subsequent happiness. Cas’s death sentence. 

He realizes that Dean misinterpreted his dying words, just as Cas had once misinterpreted what the Empty had told him. He hates how those words must have injured Dean. He’d intended them as salve.

“No, Dean. That’s not how—that’s not what happened to me.” He opens his eyes and looks down at Dean in his arms.

Dean’s breathing quickens with tears.

Cas is quiet but firm. He knows how important words are at this moment. Words are all they have. “Dean. _Dean_. Listen to me. I—I’m billions of years old. I didn’t even know what happiness was until I met you. Only in those last twelve years did I _ever_ feel happiness. At all. _You._ You’re what made me happy.”

Dean glances up at him, unconvinced. Then he goes back to pressing his face against Cas’s chest.

Cas can feel nothing but the warmth of Dean’s tears against his skin. He holds Dean as he sobs.

Finally, when Dean’s breathing starts to flatten, Cas begins again. “Angels aren’t happy beings, Dean. We just aren’t. We’re not built for it. The word ‘happiness’ barely exists in Enochian. It’s not something that enters into our day-to-day reality. We don’t exist to be happy—we exist to serve. To serve God, to serve humanity. To carry out orders. To go where we’re told, when we’re told. Not to yearn for some kind of fulfillment. Whatever you want to call it. We don’t have that. We don’t even have a word for leisure.”

Dean’s breathing slows, softens a bit. He runs his fingers along Cas’s ribcage, and Cas continues to stroke his hair.

Finally Dean is steady enough to speak. “That sucks, Cas. It sounds … god-fuckin’-awful.”

“It is.”

“But if you don’t know what you’re missing …”

“I didn’t even think about it until the Empty brought it up.”

Cas now appreciates how clever the Empty had been. It understood angels; it understood Cas. And therefore, it knew that “happiness” was a new variable, a kink in the equation. But it also overplayed its hand, sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Happiness put Cas in the Empty, but it also broke him out.

“The whole time I was with you,” Cas says, “I didn’t realize how happy you made me. Because it just wasn’t even … it’s like, I loved you, and I wanted nothing more than to be around you and Sam. But we always had work to do. So I didn’t think about happiness at all—or whether someone like me could even _be_ happy—until the Empty made me that deal in exchange for Jack’s life. And it could do that only because it had been in my head. It had access to all my memories—even the ones Naomi tried to erase. It knew about you, and it knew about Sam. It knew that I loved you, Dean. And it knew this made me different.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, his voice barely audible.

“Once it introduced the concept to me—told me that it wouldn’t take me until I experienced happiness … I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

He remembers those long nights in the bunker, wandering around as he waited for Sam and Dean to awaken. During that time, he contemplated happiness—what it was and what it could mean for someone like him. What did he really _want_? Well, in one word: Dean. Dean safe. Forever. The opportunity to love Dean, and be loved by him at the same time. To be with him in all ways. Both of them together forever. Without a care in the world.

An absurd prospect—one with too many contingencies. Not happening.

He continues. “I imagined happiness as this watershed moment, some perfect moment between me and you that I’d never be brave enough to initiate.” He touches Dean’s face. “But that’s not what the Empty promised. I misunderstood. It said it wouldn’t take me until I gave myself permission to be happy. That day, in the bunker, with you and Billie? I understood. I finally understood.”

Dean is quiet and still.

“I was already happy, Dean,” Cas continues, “just to be part of your life. We were a family. You, me, Sam. We had a child together.” He pauses. “I was pretty much the happiest angel in the history of creation. All I had to do was accept that. And tell you who you really are, and how you did that for me.”

Dean makes a noise that sounds half sob, half chuckle. Then he laughs some more. Cas is relieved. Relieved that the moment isn’t so fragile anymore.

“Cas,” Dean says. “I was the most miserable son of a bitch on the planet. It’s like … the height of all irony that I showed you what happiness is. Add another line to my résumé. ‘Killed Hitler. Helped defeat God. Taught Cas how to be happy.’” He lays his head back down on Cas’s chest and laughs.

Then he stops laughing. “But I know what you mean. I always thought of myself as an unlucky asshole. But I wasn’t. And I didn’t know that. I didn’t appreciate how lucky I’d been to get you resurrected some eighty-seven and a half times, until that one time when you didn’t come home.” He clutches the arm that Cas has draped over him, runs his thumb along Cas’s elbow. “I really thought you’d show again, and I’m not exactly a glass-half-full kinda guy.”

“I’m sorry, Dean.”

“For what? Not clawing your way out of the Empty fast enough? It’s like apologizing for only winning nine Olympic gold medals instead of ten.” He chuckles again. “Seriously, Cas. Lay off yourself.”

“No, I don’t mean it like that.” Now Cas is the one who’s quiet, still.

“What do you mean then?” Dean props his chin on his hand, which rests on Cas’s chest.

He lets himself remember those last minutes in the bunker, the horror on Dean’s face.

He’s never worked out what his death must have looked like through Dean’s eyes. In the moment that the Empty took him, Cas was at peace, happy to make the sacrifice. Even when he got to the Empty—to the “snitch ward,” as Metatron called it—he remained at peace. And that peace—coupled with how Dean had taught him to care about the world—allowed him to survive. To care about the angels he was imprisoned with.

To care about someone like Metatron. Someone like _Crowley_. 

But that’s not how Dean experienced events. To him, Cas had just disappeared into a vat of nothingness, into a void so vast and disparate that even Jack had to work overtime to find him. Had to go back to Sam and Dean and say he couldn’t find Cas anywhere.

This wasn’t purgatory or hell—places Dean had been—but someplace he could never imagine. Eternal. He thinks of Jack’s words: _You always underestimated your effect on him_.

"Cas? What do you mean?"

Cas looks at the ceiling. “To have left you like that. I mean, like _that_.” He holds Dean a little tighter. “You’d already been left so many times.”

Dean props himself up on his elbows. “No. _Hell_ no, Cas. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to put yourself in that category. Not you. Not ever.”

“I should have told you about the deal,” he says.

“Well,” Dean says. “I believe the only reply to that observation is ‘no shit, Sherlock.’”

*

They have sex again before going to sleep. Dean tells him sex in heaven isn’t so different from sex on earth. “You feel it a little more deeply,” he says. “I’m surprised. When we saw Rowena after she died, she said afterlife sex isn’t ‘flesh-on-flesh.’”

“She’s in hell, Dean. Not heaven.”

“And they don’t get to have nice things? You might want to rethink that policy. Probably why they get up to those … shenanigans.”

“It’s not something we control.” He tells Dean that heaven is for humans, and humans use sex as a bonding activity. So of course it exists in heaven.

“What about for angels? I mean, with other angels.”

“Most don’t desire it. Some do. But our true forms aren’t—I mean, it’s different. I wouldn’t know, but … most angels don’t feel emotions like that. Those of us who do learned emotions from living among humans.”

They talk a little bit about the peace between the angels. About Jack’s policy of reconciliation, which seems to be working so far.

“You think it’ll last?” Dean says. Then he says: “Sorry. Again, I’m a glass-half-empty guy. The difference between us. You think everyone’s redeemable. I think everybody’s a sack of shit.”

But Cas isn’t all that trusting anymore, and what Dean’s saying is nothing he hasn’t thought about himself. Angels have free will now, and he wonders how they’ll use it. He still doesn’t trust angels like Ishim and Raphael. He supposes others don’t trust him. “At least Michael and Raphael don’t have so much power anymore.”

“And Lucifer?”

Cas narrows his eyes. “Caged. To be reconciled, you have to be sincere. Jack believes in rehabilitation, but he’s not stupid.”

“It all sounds pretty intense,” Dean says. “Like Northern Ireland. Or post-genocide Rwanda. Hope it works out.”

“It has to,” Cas says, hoping this will end the conversation. Angel politics aren’t his favorite subject. They’re also not Dean’s problem.

“Well. In any case. I’m still curious about this true form of yours.” Dean runs one finger along Cas’s face. “And if I’ll ever get to see it.”

“I have six wings,” Cas says. “And a lot of eyes.”

“ _Really_. Well.” Dean rolls over onto his back. “Your six wings sound kinda sexy. And your eyes? Hmm. All the more to watch me when I sleep, I guess.”

“Actually, about that.” Cas lies back down. “I’m pretty tired. I think I’m going to sleep, too.”

“Oh yeah, sure Cas.” Dean pulls back more of the covers so that they can both be under them together. “I didn’t think angels got tired.”

“This one does. I’ve been tired ever since I—” He pauses.

“Got back from the Empty,” Dean finishes, reaching over to fluff Cas’s pillow. Then he drapes one arm over Cas. He’s got that mother-hen side, the side that needs to take care of people. “About that. You ever want to talk …”

“I know, Dean.”

“Good.” Dean kisses his temple, his cheeks, his chin. In a few minutes they’re fast asleep.

*

“I really don’t deserve this,” Anna said. “I shouldn’t be here. Not on this ward, with you people.”

This was Anna’s routine complaint in the Empty. As they sat in the dark, waiting for the torture to begin anew, as it did each night, the angels often fought about who among them had committed worse deeds, and who deserved what.

It got tedious fast.

Cas never participated. He was always trying to tend to Gadreel, whose suffering was particularly acute. Gadreel’s ordeal seemed to last longer than everyone else’s—after he’d been disemboweled each night, he got put back together slowly. Was nearly catatonic.

“I mean, you two,” Anna said, pointing to Malachi and Bartholomew, “you’re psychopaths. And there’s Metatron, who for no good reason apparently staged a coup and cast all the angels out of heaven. Gadreel’s responsible for the suffering of all mankind. And you, Castiel.” She made a noise of disgust. “I can’t even look at you.” She paced. “And what did I do? Oh, that’s right. I wanted to be a human girl. Wow. So I'm apparently among one of the people angels hate most. So round me up and send me to Guantanamo with heaven’s most reviled. Gotta love those double standards. That angelic misogyny.”

“Grow up,” Metatron said. “You rebelled. You full-on rebelled, Anna dear. And you killed Uriel.”

“You gotta be shitting me. _Shitting me_ , Metatron.”

“I’m just saying. If you’re looking for a reason—”

“Will you shut the fuck up?” Crowley said. “Listening to you chucklefucks talk about your persecution complexes makes me want to beg for waterboarding. Or a Mariah Carey Christmas album.”

Crowley registered similar sentiments every day, with varying degrees of vehemence, but when it came to this pointless fighting, Cas and Crowley were indeed on the same side.

Cas had tried to reason with his brothers and sister about their bickering. _This is what the Empty wants. It wants to turn us against each other._

No one ever listened— _Too late for that_ , they said. So he just tried to comfort Gadreel, whose extreme distress was a result of the suffering inflicted by Abner. Abner, who had once been his best friend. Whom he’d betrayed.

“It’s Castiel’s fault this place is a shitshow,” Malachi said. “He woke that bitch up.”

Cas held Gadreel’s arms, his shoulders, hoping that someone else’s presence would snap him out of it. He said, “We’re never going to find a way out of here if we don’t start working together on it.”

“Cut the sanctimony, Castiel,” Bartholomew said. “We’re not getting out of here. Ever. That hope-and-change bullshit might have worked for your human fuckbuddies. But now you’re with us. And the one you gripped tight and raised from perdition? Doesn’t seem interested in returning the favor.”

Cas ignored this kind of bluster, the trash-talking his cellmates did about his history with the Winchesters. He knew how he survived each night—each terrifying, torturous night: by retreating to a space in his mind where he could think about Dean. Think about Dean’s laugh. His eyelashes. The bridge of his nose. The times they shared. It didn’t always work, but it was his only defense.

Gadreel had no such coping mechanism. Malachi and Bartholomew seemed to suffer equally, while Anna and Metatron fared a bit worse.

Gadreel was an absolute mess. His hands shook constantly. He could barely speak. When he did, it was to bargain with something, to pray in Enochian to some unknown deity.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out that they suffered in proportion to the guilt they felt, and that the anticipation of what would happen to them each night was worse than what actually happened. Gadreel pointed that out in one of his more lucid moments, which were becoming fewer and farther between. He said that all the millennia in heaven’s lockup taught him that—that waiting to be tortured was worse than torture itself. That during all that time, he never longed for an antidote to the physical pain—but he’d have taken anything for the crippling anxiety.

“If your mind makes it worse,” Cas said, “then your mind can make it better.”

None of his cellmates bought this. “We’re not meditating our way out of torture,” Metatron said. Outside their cell, the sound of other inmates trying to breach the walls. Again.

Was this really what he deserved? Probably, Cas thought. He knew he’d done some good—at least he’d _tried_ to do some good—but it didn’t matter. It didn’t bring back the angels he’d killed.

Cas did agree with Anna on one thing, though—she really didn’t deserve to be locked up with them. And it was that detail that got him thinking. “How do we know this is the ‘snitch ward’?” he asked. “That we’re the most hated of our species?”

*

The next morning, Dean is up before he is. That’s a first. He’s in bed, reading a book, but he looks down at Cas as he wakes up. “Good morning, starshine.”

Cas shakes himself awake. “You were watching me sleep?”

“Yeah, I was. How do you like them apples?”

“I like apples a lot,” Cas says, still sleepy. Apples grow everywhere in heaven, something he’d been planning to point out to Dean. A homage to a fourth-century saint.

Dean just smiles and leans over to kiss him. He wraps his arms around Dean and Dean rolls him onto his back. They share a kiss that lasts for minutes.

Dean breaks it off, cups Cas’s upper arm. “What we did last night—that was okay for you?”

“It was more than okay, Dean.”

Dean’s lips twitch, trying to hide a smile. “You wouldn’t mind if we did it again?”

“When? Now?”

Dean shrugs. “Or next week. Maybe we can make a regular appointment. Like a hairdresser.”

Now he knows Dean is joking, so he reaches up to touch the back of his head, kisses him again.

This time they’re slower, more relaxed. They take their time, figuring each other out.

When they’re finished—to the point that they want to be—and Cas is lying on his side, with Dean pressed against him, his stomach growls.

“Geez,” Dean says. “That’s bizarre.”

“I agree.” A hunger pang. He’s felt hungry only a few times in his long life. “Maybe it’s because you mentioned apples earlier. Are you hungry?”

Dean looks at him, perplexed. “I haven’t been hungry since I got here. I thought that was one of the perks of being dead—never being hungry.”

“It is odd,” Cas remarks. “Especially for a celestial.”

“Celestials aren’t supposed to sleep, either. And yet you did plenty of that.”

“Perhaps something’s wrong with me.”

Dean pushes back the covers and takes Cas by the hand. “Nah. If you’re hungry, you’re hungry. We’ll fix that.”

But in the kitchen they find empty cupboards and a refrigerator that’s empty of everything except ketchup and some tuna salad in a bowl covered by plastic wrap. Dean uncovers it. “It’s fresh,” he says. “But … random. Did you put that here?”

“No.”

“Maybe Jack did?” Dean covers it back up and puts it back on the shelf. “I like tuna salad as much as the next person, but that’s not going to do it.” He closes the door. “Where to get food in heaven? Do you order it? Manifest it? What?”

“There are restaurants in town.”

“Really? Why?”

Cas shrugs. “Because heaven is for humans, and humans like them. They like going to them, even if they don’t have to actually eat. A bonding activity.”

“Ah.”

“It’s something Jack learned from you and Sam. Food is how you show you care about someone.”

Dean pulls Cas toward him, gives him a casual embrace and kisses the side of his face. “I’ll get you something, bring it back.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Afraid I’ll run off? Get into mischief?”

He does not think these things, but at this moment, he wants nothing more than to be with Dean. He should stay at the house, really—he knows the second they’re seen by an angel it’ll be all over angel radio—but the urge to be with Dean is more powerful.

Dean says, “Jimmy Novak lives in town, I think. And dude is pissed. What if you run into him?”

“He won’t see me like this. Again, I’m seen as I want to be seen.” _By humans, anyway_ , he thinks. Angels can always recognize each other, regardless of what form they’re taking.

They could drive but decide to walk instead, and Cas explains a little more about heaven, how it’s put together, how this secluded place can exist for them while being part of wider heaven. When they get to town they decide on a diner that serves breakfast, and though it’s crowded, there are always going to be seats.

When Dean opens the door for them, Cas sees Malachi. He’s standing behind the host’s station.

“Cas,” he says, moving from behind the podium. His face lights up; he smiles broadly. Cas doesn’t remember seeing him smile before. Not like that, like someone purely happy. 

“Malachi.”

Malachi clasps him in a firm hug, pats his shoulders, his back. “Haven’t seen you in ages, man. You look great. So much better than you did in rehab.”

“You too.” He steps back, gives Malachi’s arm a firm pat. “Is this—?” He gestures to the restaurant.

“I just work here. Eliah runs the place.” He looks at Dean. Suppresses a smile. “I’ll get you a good booth.”

Once they’re seated together (on the same side of the booth, of course), Dean asks. “Wasn’t he one of the—”

“Insurrectionists. Yes.”

Dean looks like he wants to ask. But he doesn’t. Instead, he asks him if he knows what he wants to eat.

*

“How do we know this is the ‘snitch ward’? That we’re the most hated of our species?”

No one had a solid answer except Metatron, who cited his superior powers of observation and deduction. “I mean, look around. What else do we have in common? Our stellar good looks?”

Cas shook his head, reaching out to touch the pitch-black wall of their cell. “No.” He turned around. “Anna’s right. She doesn’t deserve to be here.”

“Thank you,” Anna said.

“Neither does Gadreel.”

“Okay, well that’s bullshit.”

Cas didn’t take his hand away from the wall. “He made a stupid mistake thousands of years ago. Which he paid for, times ten. And then he fell in with Metatron, made some shitty decisions. But he made up for them in the end.” He paused. “He blew himself up just to save me. And Hannah. And to free everyone else from Metatron. And Metatron—” He turned to look at Metatron. “You had your moments, Metatron. A lot of moments. But in the end you stepped up and sacrificed yourself, just like Gadreel.”

His heart started beating harder. “And I—I betrayed friends.” He glanced at Anna. “I released the leviathan into the world, killed thousands of my own kind. Did I redeem myself? I don’t know. I still don’t know. But I’m not the worst things I’ve ever done. None of us is.”

There was silence. Then Crowley said, “Well, thanks for the monologue, Cas. Just what I needed to get my mind off my next rape by tire iron—more self-serving angelic wallowing.”

“None of this is real,” Cas said. “Or if it is, it’s only because we’re making it real.”

“Bullshit it’s not real,” Bartholomew said. “Tell that to my throat, which gets cut out every night.”

Cas turned to Metatron. “You’re the one who introduced the idea of a ‘snitch ward,’ Metatron. You set the narrative. You told a story—a convincing story, which got everyone on board. We bought it.”

“What, like this is _my_ fault?”

“Not intentionally. You were just doing what you do. But in setting the stage—”

“Confirmation bias,” Anna said, catching on faster than anyone else, providing Cas with the vocabulary he didn't have. “We’re reinforcing each other’s belief systems, based on the information Metatron gave us.”

“It’s the only way the Empty can keep us occupied—can keep us asleep. It's learned the hard way that individuals can be woken.”

“So this is all just some fucked-up dream?” Malachi said. “And we’re _sharing_ it?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Why us?”

“I don’t know,” Cas said.

“Guilt,” Metatron said. “We feel guilty. We share similar regrets. So the Empty—”

“It’s taking advantage of us,” Anna said, “by linking our minds together. In reality, there could be thousands of groups of angels and demons just like us, sharing dreams based on what they did before they died. All reinforcing each other’s visions. Groups kept small enough to prevent people from having conflicting experiences. We _think_ we're the most hated, so therefore it seems natural to us that we're suffering at the hands of all the people we've betrayed. Other groups might be going through the same thing, based on their own regrets.”

“It’s why I saw the leviathan last night,” Cas said. “They don’t even go here. They belong in purgatory. I saw them because of my guilt. None of this is real.”

Crowley stood. “Well that’s touching. But one piece doesn’t fit, and that’s me. I blow your little theory out of the water.” He shrugged. “I don’t experience guilt. Don’t even know the concept. And ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if it doesn’t—”

“We both know that’s bullshit, Crowley,” Cas said.

Crowley opened his mouth as if to say something. Then he closed his eyes and shook his head.

Cas stepped aside to face off with Malachi and Bartholomew, who remained impassive. “You two.”

“They don’t feel guilt,” Anna said. “They’re not capable. I can’t vouch for your demon pal, but those two are stone cold killers.”

“No regular angel is automatically a killer, Anna. We aren’t built that way. But we can be programmed.”

Bartholomew just stared straight ahead, but Malachi looked at him. 

Cas set his hands on Malachi’s shoulders, stared straight into his eyes. “You’ve done terrible things, Malachi. You’ve killed angels. You’ve butchered friends. Innocent humans. Tortured people. Started insurrections. You mowed down anyone who got in your way. Just like me.”

Malachi’s eyes searched his.

“But what did you do before that, Malachi?”

Malachi’s eyes darted. “I don’t—I don’t—”

“You don’t remember. You know why you don’t remember? Naomi. She tampered with all of us at one point or another. She erased us, things we did, people we met. Things we shared. Things we … had in common.” He gripped Malachi’s shoulders harder. “Like us, she was just following orders. But the program she ran turned us into something we weren’t.” He glanced at Bartholomew. “You know because you were part of it. But maybe _you_ don’t even remember now. Maybe she had you so damaged that you didn’t know what was going on.”

“He’s lying,” Bartholomew said. “Or delusional. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“He may be delusional,” Metatron said. “But you and I both know he’s not lying.” He looked at Anna and Malachi. “Those rumors you heard? The things that snap you out of a moment? Those places you remember but have never been? All true.”

“I suspect you feel bad about it, Bartholomew,” Cas said. “It’s why you’re here.”

No one said anything for a long time. Finally Crowley spoke up. “Listen to what this guy has to say. I mean, he’s bonkers. Nice to look at but otherwise thick as a Jersey cow. But when it comes to detecting this kind of chicanery? The Winchesters’ third-wheel wing-buddy is a fucking savant.”

*

The clink of saucers interrupts his thoughts. Then a waiter plunks two mugs of coffee, asks what they want.

Cas is in the far corner of the booth, with Dean sitting on the aisle. Dean glances at him. “Uh, we’ll just have your regular breakfast scramble. A side of fries.” Once the waiter leaves, Dean leans closer. “You okay?” he whispers into Cas’s ear. “You want to get this to go?”

“No—” he starts to say, but his voice isn’t quite there. He clears his throat. “No. I’m fine, Dean.”

“You’re not.”

“I will be.”

“ _Will_ is the sticking point here. You will be. You’re not right now.”

It’s taking him every ounce of strength to keep himself steady.

“Hey,” Dean says, setting a hand on his shoulder. “Seriously, pal. I’m here for you. And if you don’t want to talk, that’s cool too. Plenty of things I didn’t feel like talking about—not even to you or Sam. But you gotta let me in on your limits. Is it restaurants? Crowds? Other angels?”

 _Other angels_.

*

“The program wasn’t intended for nefarious purposes,” Bartholomew said. “It was designed to help angels. You have to trust me on that one.”

“Un-fucking-believable,” Anna said. 

“It was to keep us all from turning into that!” Bartholomew pointed at Gadreel, who was currently doubled over, whimpering and unresponsive. “You have any idea what centuries—millennia—of fighting and killing do to an angel? Of being forced to commit genocide? To snuff out entire continents of people when the fucking archangels decided they'd had enough? Huh? That messes an angel up.” He paused. “We used to have to euthanize scores of our own kind after each battle, their mental suffering was so great. We couldn’t go on like that. So … someone found a better way.”

“Deleting our memories was a better way?” Cas said.

“I don’t know. I didn’t start the program. Don’t know who did. But yeah, it probably seemed like a kinder option. Rather than putting angels down. Or watching them go insane or wither away or … defect to the other side.”

Anna leaned against the wall. “Did it ever occur to you or anyone in that operation that we reacted badly to all those battles and genocides for a reason? Because we’re not machines? Because we’re not the cold and unfeeling soldiers you wanted us to be?”

“We were trying to help.”

“By turning us into robots? Into _monsters_? We had feelings for a reason, Bartholomew! You can't protect creation if you don't care about it. No wonder everything went to shit.”

Malachi turned away. Then he turned back and shoved Bartholomew against the wall. “What did you turn me into? I don’t know who the hell I am. Who I was supposed to be!”

“Oh trust me, Mal, you’re exactly—”

“ _Stop it_ ,” Cas said. “We sort it out later. After we’re out of this place.”

“No guarantees of that,” Malachi said.

Cas put himself between Malachi and Bartholomew. “Time to stow our crap. _All_ of it. And figure out how to wake up. Once we’re awake, the Empty begins to lose its grip on us. It can’t keep us here. I’ve seen it happen before.”

But they soon discovered that they couldn’t wake up. Simply knowing about the dream didn’t rouse them from sleep. And Cas knew that the way he got out last time was through Jack—that Jack had been strong enough to wake him.

“Who the hell is Jack?” Anna asked.

“My son. A nephilim. Extraordinarily powerful.”

“You diddled a human and fathered a nephil?” Metatron said. “Jesus, Cas, you really have gone native.”

“No, I—he’s adopted.” He decided not to mention Jack’s true parentage, for obvious reasons.

“So where is he?” Malachi said. “If he was able to wake you up once before, then why the hell doesn’t he just do that again?”

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “He could be dead.” The thought had long ago occurred to him—that Jack and Sam and Dean were all dead, that Chuck had spirited away their entire world. “Or depowered. Or … it could be that the Empty is more overwhelming now. It has more of us than it ever did before.”

He recalled that his strong bond with Jack—forged when Jack was still in utero—was key to his escape. But Cas was now sharing a bond with several other entities. “Maybe he can’t connect to me because I’m linked to the rest of you. I don’t know.”

“Peachy,” Crowley said. “This just gets better.”

Then he remembered the last time he’d seen Jack—after Jack had exploded in the Empty and landed back in the bunker, the Empty roiled by the noise and commotion. Roiled enough to take vengeance. Which it was doing right now.

Cas looked down at Gadreel. Then he turned to Metatron. “Time to change the narrative. When they bust in tonight …” He could hear them drawing closer. “When they come for us, one of us needs to wrestle a shiv away from them.”

“For what?”

“The sigil you got those suicide bombers to carve into their chests. That Gadreel carved into his chest. You’re going to carve it into mine.”

“So you can blow yourself up?”

Cas held out his hands.

Anna said, “What makes you think that’ll even work? You’re blowing yourself up in a dream, not in reality.”

“Maybe it won’t. It might not be enough to disturb the Empty … but maybe it’ll be enough to wake one of us up. Enough of a jolt. So one of us can get the hell out of here. And if my son is still alive, you get to him and the Winchesters and tell them what’s going on.”

Metatron was shaking his head. “This is bonkers. Where will you go _after_ you blow up?”

“I don’t know. I could wake up, or I could be still here. Or I could be gone forever.” Jack had escaped the Empty after he exploded, but that was with Billie's help. Cas also suspected that Jack strong enough to do so because he was half archangel. Cas doubted that things would go the same way for him.

“If I get out by blowing myself up, I’ll find my son. If I don’t make it out or survive the explosion, then whichever one of you manages to wake up will have to go to him yourself. You need to tell him that our minds are entangled here in the Empty. That might be why he can’t find me.”

“And if he’s not alive?” Bartholomew said.

“Then you find Rowena. If anyone else can figure this out, she can.”

“Who’s Rowena?”

“The queen of hell,” Cas said. “And also—” He pointed to Crowley. “His mother.”

Four angels turned to stare at Crowley. He shrugged.

“I need a flowchart to keep track of this shit,” Metatron said. “I’ve been dead for too long.”

Anna shook her head. “All of this is … insanity. But at least it’s a shot.”

Malachi jutted forward. “I can’t go along with this, unless—unless I’m the one blowing myself up.”

“This isn’t the time for stupid heroics, Malachi,” Cas said.

“Exactly, Castiel. We don’t even know if this is gonna work. It’s an experiment, and I’m expendable. You’re not. If this doesn’t work, at least these people still have you. You’ll figure out something else.”

Bartholomew looked at Crowley. “What if he’s the one who wakes up? Then we’re all fucked. He gets away and skips back home to his mom and leaves the rest of us to rot.”

Crowley rolled his eyes. “Unlike you mind-molested featherfucks, I know which direction is up. And I keep my promises.”

*

 _Other angels_.

In the booth, he feels Dean’s arm around his shoulder, like Dean is trying to hold him together. But he sees something else: Malachi is talking to two patrons, pointing them in his direction. Two familiar figures. Daniel and Adina.

They approach the booth, smiling as they draw closer.

“Castiel,” Adina says. “What a surprise, to see you here.”

Dean gets up so that Cas can slide out of the booth to greet his friends—he hugs them hello, Adina kisses him on the cheek—and then he introduces Dean. Not that Dean needs an introduction.

“Nice to meet you, Dean Winchester,” Adina says.

“Nice to meet you, Dean Winchester,” Daniel says. “We trust you didn’t have any issues getting here?”

“A smooth flight the whole way,” Dean replies. “No bumps.”

“Why don’t you sit with us?” Cas says.

They all slide into the booth together. Cas thinks it might make more sense if he sat on the aisle, but Dean’s clearly in his protective mode, so he takes the seat by the wall again.

“We saw Anna on the way,” Daniel says, “and asked if she wanted to come with us, but she said she didn’t want to be a third wheel. But what’s wrong with a third wheel?”

Dean picks up his coffee. “Absolutely nothing. You guys come here a lot?”

“We come here on our teaching days,” Adina says. “We like the atmosphere. Good people-watching opportunities.”

They make a bit of small talk about heaven and where Dean’s been since he got there. They ask about his family and whether he’s seen them yet (Daniel and Adina are particularly piqued by what goes on in human families), and then Adina says that they watched the movie that Metatron recommended. _Love Story_. She asks Dean if he’s seen it.

“Never heard of it.”

“‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry,’” Daniel says. “That’s what we learned, though Anna tells us that’s just not true.”

“Oh, _that_ movie,” Dean says. “Ali McGraw. Ryan O’Neal. Total babe.” He glances at Cas out of the corner of his eye and smirks. Cas wonders which actor Dean is referring to.

“They’ve been working their way through romantic movies,” Cas explains to Dean.

“Cool, I love chick flicks.”

Adina continues. “In the past few days we’ve also seen _Brokeback Mountain_ , _Sophie's Choice, Me Before You, Never Let Me Go, Atonement …_ ”

“Okay, those aren’t chick flicks,” Dean says. “Those are tragedy porn.”

Adina and Daniel stare at him. “Tragedy has porn?”

“Everything has porn.”

Adina and Daniel share a puzzled look. “The things you learn from humans,” Daniel says.

Cas’s food arrives and Dean tells him to dig in. He takes a few fries from Cas’s plate, but otherwise he’s not hungry. Cas, on the other hand, is famished.

“The movie I thought was saddest was _Never Let Me Go_ ,” Adina says. “It’s about these clones who are raised to be organ donors and nothing more. Their organs are harvested and they’re dead before they’re thirty.” She pauses. “It reminded me of what our lives are like. As angels.”

“Whereas I don’t see the similarities,” Daniel says. “At all.”

“We argued about it the whole way down here. Daniel says the fact that they all die makes it a human story about mortality. And as angels, we don’t die. Not really. Or we at least don’t live with the constant awareness of impending death hanging over us.”

“That experience is unique to the human condition," Daniel says. “Humans are incredibly brave in that regard. Knowing they could die at any time, but choosing to carry on anyway. Still hoping. Finding meaning." 

Dean drags a fry through some ketchup.

“But these clones have no control over their lives,” Adina continues. “It’s accepted that they don’t have souls, even though they clearly experience all the same emotions as humans. They passively accept their fate, which is to give up everything for other people. What they want for themselves—well, it’s like they’re not even able to ask. And they’re also raised in an institutional setting and don’t have parents—just each other. Have you ever seen it, Dean Winchester?”

“Nope. Can’t say I have.”

Daniel nods at Cas’s plate. “You’re hungry, Castiel.”

“I know, it’s quite odd,” Cas says.

“It’s just a side-effect,” Adina says. “Gabriel went through it too. Don't you remember, he couldn't stop eating? Maybe you were still laid up at that point. But anyway, it means you’re getting your strength back.” She turns to Dean. “So Dean Winchester, have you thought about what you want to do here in heaven?”

*

Daniel and Adina leave for the historical society, parting ways with Dean and Cas in front of the diner.

“Those two are a trip,” Dean says. “How do you know them?”

“A long story.”

Dean takes his hand. “I have time.”

He leads Dean to a strand near the edge of town. There you can look out on a large body water; there are boats. A couple people surfing. Dean says he likes this—having lived most of his life in a landlocked state, he appreciates the water.

They sit on a bench together. The wind is strong, just as it is on earth. Cas begins to tell the story, that when Metatron cast the angels out of heaven, some of them adapted to earth and didn’t want to go back, Daniel and Adina especially. “They found peace down there. They began to understand free will. They just wanted to be left alone.” He remembers how they were just living off the land, bothering no one. “But other angels considered it a form of rebellion. When one tried to coerce them into going back, they killed him.”

He runs through the story, telling Dean how Hannah had fetched him so they could try to persuade Daniel and Adina to return to heaven to face punishment. How things went sideways, and Cas ended up killing Daniel. How Adina was distraught afterwards, enraged, tracking down him and Hannah to kill them. And then how Crowley intervened.

By the time he’s finished telling the story, Dean has both arms wrapped around him. Holding him, like he might break apart. The temperature is a bit cool—Cas suspects that Dean wanted it that way so he'd have an excuse to take off his jacket and drape it around Cas, which he did several minutes ago.

 _He wants to take care of me_ , Cas thinks. He marvels at the idea. ( _The irony?)_ He's an ancient celestial being. He was forged from the cosmos, designed to protect creation. But wrapped around him is a human man whose life on earth was as fleeting as a firefly dusk. In his mind, Malachi's words are remade for him: _Who was I supposed to be?_

Dean doesn’t say anything for a long time. His lips graze Cas’s cheek. “You sure do get around, Cas.”

“I used to wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t come to Hannah’s defense. If I’d let Daniel kill Hannah and then let them both go.” He knows he probably would have died soon after—it was Adina’s grace that restored him until he could locate his own. “I don’t wonder about things like that anymore.” A tear slips down his cheek. He wipes it away quickly.

“Good,” Dean whispers. He rubs his hand along Cas’s arm. “You are one brave sonofabitch, let me tell you. Don't let anyone tell you different. Never met anyone like you when it comes to that stuff.”

“Thank you, Dean.”

He knows Dean wants him to divulge the story of the Empty, but he’s not there yet. He could tell Dean the ending—that Malachi’s bomb did what they’d hoped, waking Crowley, who was able to connect to Rowena, and once Jack could connect to Cas, the Empty's hours were numbered—but he knows that’s not really what Dean wants him to disclose. He wants to know about those agonizing days and terrifying nights that defy language. He wants Cas to let him share the burden he took on. Cas wants to tell him it's not necessary, but he also knows that Dean just wants to help. Wants them to be as close as possible, no secrets between them.

“And you’re strong,” Dean says. “But we need to get you stronger.”

He turns his head so he can look into Dean’s eyes.

“Didn’t tell you this before, Cas. But Jack offered to put me back on earth. When I saw him. He said he’s committed to not doing this kind of thing, but that he’d make an exception for me, if I really wanted it.” He exhales. “He also said that if I went back, it had to be for myself. Not because I’m thinking about what Sammy wants or needs. Or about anyone else.” He loosens his grip on Cas a little bit. “I said no.”

Cas studies him, intent on processing all of this as Dean is feeling it.

“And even if I _were_ thinking about Sammy, I’d still say no.”

“You would?”

“Sammy’s gonna be fine. That I’m sure of, zero doubts on my end. Also, I’m not gonna burn Jack’s relationship with the reapers. Might make Christmas dinners a bit awkward.” He chuckles. “Beyond all that, though—I don’t know, Cas. I guess heaven agrees with Winchesters. I’ve never seen my parents so mellow and I—I don’t feel angry anymore.” 

Cas feels a kind of relief that’s two seconds from spilling into tears.

“I like being with everyone I ever loved. Why would I go back?” He peers at Cas. Smiles. “Oh, come here,” he says, grabbing Cas for a tight embrace.

When they finally pull apart again, Dean says, “But I’m gonna need you to do something for me. This is why I need to get you stronger. Back up to full speed.”

“Sure, Dean. Anything you need.”

“I need you to go see Sammy. Or make contact with him in some way. Meet him in a dream, give him a sign, anything.”

“You want me to tell Sam you’re okay.”

“No, I need you to tell him that _you’re_ okay. He loved you too, Cas. Like I always said, you’re the best friend we ever had. Sam still doesn’t know what happened to you, and he misses you like hell. And for him to move on, it’s gonna take seeing you with his own eyes. Hearing your voice. Trust me, I know how the kid operates.” He takes Cas’s hand in his. “Can you do that for me?”

*

When he visits Sam, it’s in a dream, but in Sam's dream the bunker feels just as Cas remembers it, and Sam’s joy and tears are palpable too. Sam grasps Cas in a hug that feels as solid and real as any they shared when Cas occupied a vessel. 

Cas never appears to Sam again. He doesn’t need to. But he still looks in on him from time to time, just to see what he’s doing, how his life comes together. It happens quickly now, from here on out. Time passes much more easily, on both sides of existence.

Dean says he doesn’t want to know the details of Sam’s new life. He trusts that Sam will be fine, that he’ll arrive soon, and that when he does so he’ll have stories from his life—stories that Dean can hear for the first time. 

Stories that will be the happiest of surprises.

So Cas keeps the details to himself. And he instructs his angel friends to do the same, whenever they’re in Dean’s presence. (They still can’t help but look in on a Winchester from time to time.) But in his own mind, he begins to make a list, and from this list, a narrative takes shape.

_Sam’s gone back to school. He’s decided he really wanted to become a social worker. To help people. He thinks of Jack. And you. He remembers you're why he chose this path._

_Sam lives outside Seattle now. He has a son. Named after you_.

 _Sam is still healthy, though he does take medication to keep his blood pressure in check. He doesn’t sleep as soundly as he once did, but he still exercises quite a lot. His son just graduated from college_.

_Sam still misses you. Still thinks about you all the time. And me and Jack and your mom and your dad and Bobby. But you he really misses. You’re the one he talks to when he’s sad, or when he thinks no one can hear him._

_He doesn't know I can hear him. Doesn't know I still visit._

_He finally told his son all the details, things he never shared before with anyone except you. I think he was worried he’d burden his son with all of that, if he told him everything. That the knowledge alone would be too much. But it actually brought them closer together and—and that’s good, Dean. They needed to get closer. Sam is sick, but doesn’t yet know that he’s sick. I promise you that he won’t suffer. We would never allow that_.

 _We_ _would never allow Sam to suffer._

When it’s time—a time that reaches them far sooner than they thought possible—Dean says he knows exactly where Sam will be. Sam won’t wander heaven the way he once did.

Cas tells Dean to go along first, to get a head start. “Sam has a lot to tell you,” he says.

“Okay, Cas. But don’t take too long. You swear you’ll be right behind me?”

Cas squeezes his hand and tells him yes. Yes, he will. 


End file.
